Cloudflare Outage Demonstrates How a Single Point Can Disrupt the Modern Internet
What you should know:
– Cloudflare—a critical internet infrastructure provider—has experienced a severe outage, disrupting a significant portion of the global web.
– The situation was identified as a worldwide issue involving “extensive 500 errors” and an “internal server error.”
– The breakdown rapidly incapacitated major services, including X, OpenAI’s ChatGPT, creative platform Canva, and favored online games like League of Legends.
Typically, the internet is chaotic, but today, November 18, 2025, it ceased to function as a utility and transformed into a high-stakes, worldwide comedy of errors.
Around 6:00 am ET, a substantial section of the internet went offline. The culprit was Cloudflare, a firm that provides essential network infrastructure for numerous websites. Thus, when it fails, the digital realm struggles to recover.
Users attempting to access everything from X to the film review site Letterboxd encountered the universally dreaded “internal server error on Cloudflare’s network.”
Cloudflare acknowledged this as a worldwide problem with “extensive 500 errors.” To complicate matters, the company’s own diagnostic tools and API also became nonfunctional, leaving the team addressing the issue without their usual support.
The list of affected services was extensive, highlighting how integral Cloudflare is to our daily activities. Not only did social media platforms go offline, but AI applications like OpenAI’s ChatGPT also became unavailable. Creative workers couldn’t access Canva, and famous online games like League of Legends were similarly down.
One of the most ironic aspects of this outage was that services designed to monitor internet issues, such as Downdetector, were also impacted. When the site intended to report outages is also down, it indicates the severity of the predicament.
Cloudflare conceded that the situation was serious, stating it was “investigating an issue that affects multiple customers.” The company did not provide a specific explanation, but it is notable that Cloudflare had scheduled maintenance at its Santiago (SCL) data center that same day, from 12:00 to 15:00 UTC.
This outage mirrors previous major disruptions, like the infamous Amazon Web Services (AWS) failures. It underscores how heavily the modern internet relies on a few central infrastructure providers. Initial reports indicated some improvement in locations like the UK, but US users soon encountered additional error notifications.
