What Happened
On 18 November 2025, Cloudflare experienced a major, global outage.
This wasn’t a small, regional glitch — many big platforms were hit: X (formerly Twitter), ChatGPT, Canva, Spotify, League of Legends, and more.
Users mainly saw HTTP 500 Internal Server Error when trying to load sites that rely on Cloudflare.
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Cloudflare’s Explanation: The Root Cause
According to Cloudflare, the outage started because of a spike in “unusual traffic” to one of its internal services, starting around 6:20 AM ET.
This spike caused errors for “some traffic passing through Cloudflare’s network.”
While the exact source or reason for the traffic surge is not yet known, Cloudflare says its teams are “all hands on deck” to understand and fix it.
As part of remediation, Cloudflare temporarily disabled its WARP encryption service in London.
According to status updates, some services (like Access and WARP) have started recovering, though higher-than-normal error rates may still persist.
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Why This Is Big
1. Cloudflare Is Everywhere
Cloudflare is a backbone for a huge number of websites and apps. When Cloudflare has a problem, it cascades to many other services.
2. Internet Centralization Risk
This incident highlights how the internet depends heavily on a few infrastructure providers. If one major player has a failure, it can lead to widespread disruption.
3. Not Necessarily an Attack
Right now, experts don’t think this is a cyber-attack. The traffic spike appears to be from legitimate or at least unusual-but-not-malicious sources, according to Cloudflare.
4. Ongoing Investigation
Cloudflare is still fixing things and investigating the cause. This means full resolution might take time, and some error spikes could continue.
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What Does an HTTP 500 Error Mean in This Context?
The HTTP 500 Internal Server Error is a generic error indicating something went wrong on the server side. In Cloudflare’s case, it's not just the origin (i.e., the website) that's having issues — it's Cloudflare’s own network or systems.
According to Cloudflare’s own documentation, 500 errors can arise from configuration issues or problems in Cloudflare’s infrastructure.
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Is User Data at Risk?
No indication right now that this is a security breach or data loss incident.
Cloudflare has not reported any compromised data or malicious activity — this seems to be a service disruption caused by infrastructure strain or an internal issue.
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Why Did This Happen Now?
While Cloudflare hasn’t confirmed the exact trigger, some possible contributing factors based on public reports and speculation:
Traffic Surge from Legitimate Sources: Could be a sudden viral event or app demand, causing a real spike in user requests.
Maintenance Activity: Some reports suggest Cloudflare was doing scheduled maintenance in certain data centers.
Network Congestion: High load on internal systems (e.g., routers or peering links) might have caused CPU spikes, leading to service degradation.
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What’s Being Done Right Now
Cloudflare has identified the issue and is deploying a fix.
They are monitoring error rates and gradually restoring affected services.
Once stability is restored, they'll investigate the root cause of the traffic spike.
For some affected services (like WARP), connection was re-enabled only after ensuring stability.
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What This Means for Users
If you were seeing “500 Internal Server Error” on sites like ChatGPT or X, it’s likely because of Cloudflare’s outage, not your own internet or the website’s backend.
Most likely, this will resolve in some time, but intermittent errors might continue as Cloudflare finishes its remediation.
For website owners using Cloudflare: keep monitoring your Cloudflare dashboard/status page for updates, and check if your own site’s origin is healthy (just in case).
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Key Takeaways
1. Cloudflare is down because of an internal service issue, triggered by a spike in traffic.
2. It’s not (so far) a cyber-attack — more likely an infrastructure overload or misconfiguration.
3. Many major websites and apps are affected because they depend on Cloudflare.
4. Cloudflare is working to fix the issue actively, but full recovery may take some time.
5. For most users, this is a temporary disruption — but it's a reminder of how centralized some parts of Internet infrastructure are.
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