Millions of internet users across the globe experienced a digital standstill on Tuesday, November 18, 2025, as a major Cloudflare outage led to massive errors.
Cloudflare, one of the web’s most critical infrastructure providers, experienced an unidentified problem on Tuesday, which meant internet users could not access some of its customers’ websites.
Affected internet users saw a message indicating there was an “internal server error on Cloudflare’s network”. It asked users to “please try again in a few minutes”.
Pan-Atlantic Kompass reports that Cloudflare is one of the world’s largest providers of internet security and performance services, helping websites manage traffic, prevent attacks, and ensure visitors are real humans rather than bots. Around 20 percent of all websites globally use Cloudflare’s services in some form.
Popular services, including X (formerly Twitter), OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Spotify, and Canva, were either completely inaccessible or experiencing significant login and loading failures due to the Cloudflare outage.
In Nigeria, several media websites were also affected during the Cloudflare outage that began around 12:30pm on Tuesday.
Initial reports indicated that an internal configuration error, or an unusual spike in traffic directed at one of its services, was the likely culprit rather than an external cyberattack.
Cloudflare, which provides security, performance, and content delivery network (CDN) services to millions of websites, has confirmed on its status page that it was investigating an issue impacting multiple customers and causing widespread 500 errors.
Reacting to the outage, the company said: “We are seeing services recover, but customers may continue to observe higher-than-normal error rates as we continue remediation efforts.”
A further message said: “Update: we are continuing to investigate this issue.”
A spokesperson for Cloudflare further said: “We saw a spike in unusual traffic to one of Cloudflare’s services beginning at 11.20am. That caused some traffic passing through Cloudflare’s network to experience errors. While most traffic for most services continued to flow as normal, there were elevated errors across multiple Cloudflare services.
“We do not yet know the cause of the spike in unusual traffic. We are all hands on deck to make sure all traffic is served without errors. After that, we will turn our attention to investigating the cause of the unusual spike in traffic.”
Cloudflare’s engineers had been scheduled to carry out maintenance on Tuesday on datacentres in Tahiti, Los Angeles, Atlanta, and Santiago in Chile, but it is not clear if their activities were related to the outage.
As it tries to fix the problem it disabled an encryption service called Wrp in London and said: “Users in London trying to access the internet via Warp will see a failure to connect.”
This incident comes less than a month after a similar outage at Amazon Web Services (AWS).
The issue, which began in the AWS US-East-1 region in Virginia, was caused by a DNS resolution failure affecting the DynamoDB API endpoint, according to the company. This failure had a ripple effect on services hosted in that region, leading to widespread disruptions.
