A routine Tuesday turned chaotic on November 18, 2025, when Cloudflare, the internet’s unofficial traffic cop, tripped over its own shoelaces and accidentally brought half the web down with it. Major platforms, including X, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Spotify, Canva, Coinbase, and even Cloudflare’s own status page, faceplanted for hours, leaving millions staring at spinning loaders. For a few hours, half the world stared at error screens, wondering if their Wi-Fi had finally filed for resignation.
Cloudflare’s CTO was quick to clarify that no hackers were involved. No cyberattack, no shadowy nation-state group, no rogue AI uprising. Instead, the culprit was a “latent software bug” in a system responsible for bot mitigation. A routine configuration update accidentally triggered a massive auto-generated configuration file that grew way too large, large enough to crash a core internal service. That single failure cascaded across Cloudflare’s global network, and since it’s powers roughly 20% of the internet, that one crash cascaded globally, sending 500 errors rippling across websites, apps, and APIs.
Key Pointers & What Actually Happened:
- Not an attack: Cloudflare confirmed this was purely a technical issue.
- Root cause: An oversized configuration file crashed a critical internal system.
- Services affected: Social media, AI tools, streaming, gaming, travel portals, government services, and enterprise dashboards.
- Symptom: Widespread 500 errors, broken APIs, login failures, slow dashboards, and unusable CAPTCHAs.
- Timeline: Issues started around 11:20 UTC; a full fix was applied by ~14:30 UTC.
- Context: This outage joins AWS and Microsoft Azure in a month filled with “internet infrastructure faceplants,” raising concerns about the fragility of global digital dependencies.
By the afternoon, Cloudflare had rolled out fixes and promised a detailed breakdown, essentially, a “here’s how a single file temporarily broke your entire Tuesday.”
If nothing else, the outage reminded us of a hard truth: When Cloudflare sneezes, the internet catches a cold.
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