A widespread outage at Cloudflare, a major internet infrastructure provider, has caused numerous websites, including X (formerly Twitter), Downdetector, OpenAI and Spotify to become inaccessible on Tuesday, 18 November 2025, with users encountering “internal server error on Cloudflare’s network” messages.
Cloudflare is one of the largest companies responsible for providing web services worldwide, and when its services go down, so do many popular websites. It provides network and security products for internet service providers, Fortune 500 businesses and others. Its products include “edge computing” and tools to protect websites from cyberattacks and help them stay online during distributed denial of service (“DDOS”) attacks and heavy traffic periods.
Many people attempting to access websites or social media platforms may today notice that it’s not working; this is due to problems with Cloudflare. The issue, which began around 11:30 am UK time, led to widespread errors (see image above) affecting multiple customers globally.
Cloudflare confirmed it was investigating an internal service degradation causing widespread 500 errors, with its own dashboard and API also failing.
The company reported that services were recovering, but customers might still experience higher-than-normal error rates during the remediation process.
An update at 13:09 UTC (Coordinated Universal Time) stated the issue had been identified and a fix was being implemented, with Cloudflare Access and WARP services recovering.
Affected websites, including X, ChatGPT, Bet365, and Letterboxd, displayed error messages indicating the problem originated with Cloudflare’s network rather than their own systems.
The outage impacted a broad range of services, with tracking sites like Downdetector reporting over 10,000 user reports of issues.
Cloudflare’s status page itself experienced a 504 Gateway Timeout error at one point, indicating the severity of the disruption.
Sources for this article include:
- Cloudflare System Status
- Cloudflare outage hits UK web traffic – what the service actually does, Manchester Evening News, 18 November 2025
- Cloudflare down as X and Spotify among hundreds of websites to go offline, Independent, 18 November 2025
- Cloudflare hit by outage causing ‘widespread’ errors, Engadget, 18 November 2025
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Categories: Breaking News, World News