The Cloudflare outage “wasn’t an attack” but took down your favorite websites anyway

It’s happened again: one of the internet’s backbone providers, Cloudflare, has gone offline, taking swathes of important websites with it. It’s similar to the Amazon Web Services outage in October 2025 that took down what felt like half of the internet, stopping internet users from accessing Snapchat, Disney+, Venmo, and Canva, among scores of other sites.

This time, it’s Cloudflare’s turn, with hundreds of sites suddenly triggering alerts and Downdetector noticing huge upticks on its outage monitoring service.

Update: 12:00 EST — Nov 18, 2025

It’s been around five hours since the Cloudflare outage first began, and it’s still causing issues globally, though many sites are now back up and running.

Although Cloudflare issued a statement at 09:42 declaring “a fix has been implemented” and that it thinks “the incident is now resolved,” its latest official update, at 11:46 EST, explained the company is still resolving errors caused by the outage.

Update: 10:00 EST — Nov 18, 2025 – Cloudflare Official Statement

At around 09:45, Cloudflare CTO Dane Knecht posted a statement on his X account explaining that Cloudflare’s issue is resolved and, importantly, that the outage “was not an attack.”

Update: 08:12 EST — Nov 18, 2025

Cloudflare’s latest update states that “The issue has been identified and a fix is being implemented.”

Update: 08:00 EST — Nov 18, 2025

At 07:20, the Cloudflare status page suggested that some of its sites and services were recovering, but it has since posted that it continues to “investigate this issue.”

We are seeing services recover, but customers may continue to observe higher-than-normal error rates as we continue remediation efforts.

If your app isn’t working, it’s because Cloudflare is down

When internet infrastructure fails, it hits hard

According to Cloudflare’s official status page, Cloudflare is aware of and responding to an ongoing issue affecting numerous sites, services, and apps worldwide.

As of 06:45 on November 18, 2025, Cloudflare customers began receiving widespread 500 errors, API call failures, and other issues relating to the service being unreachable.

Investigating – Cloudflare is aware of, and investigating an issue which impacts multiple customers: Widespread 500 errors, Cloudflare Dashboard and API also failing. We are working to understand the full impact and mitigate this problem. More updates to follow shortly.

The initial message was also met with a huge uptick in Downdetector outage reports, with apps and services like Spotify, ChatGPT/OpenAI, Facebook, Canva, and more all affected.

What services are affected by the Cloudflare outage?

The range of services affected by Cloudflare’s ongoing outage varies by region, but Downdetector gives us a good idea of what you can expect.

The cloud is a fickle thing

This is a small segment of the affected services, as said. And as a developing situation, the services affected may also change. The Cloudflare outage is yet another stark reminder that our reliance on specific cloud infrastructure makes the internet a surprisingly vulnerable entity. With so many sites and services relying on these tech behemoths, there is a significant responsibility on them to remain secure and active to deliver a proper service; when they fail, the knock-on effects are often huge and can take several days for businesses to recover from, even if the problem is resolved within hours.