Cloudflare Outage Triggers Global Disruptions to Major Online Services
- Minseo Kim
- Nov 19
- 1 min read
Nov 19, 2025
Minseo Kim
A widespread outage at web infrastructure company Cloudflare caused major disruptions across the internet on the evening of November 18, temporarily blocking access to ChatGPT, X (formerly Twitter), Google services, YouTube, Facebook, and several global platforms. The outage began around 8:30 p.m. Korea Standard Time, when Cloudflare’s internal service performance began to sharply decline.
Cloudflare, which supports the smooth operation and security of countless websites, handles nearly 20% of global internet traffic. Because such a significant portion of traffic flows through its network, even a single-point issue can lead to large-scale service failures worldwide. Monitoring service DownDetector reported a sudden surge in error reports from hundreds of sites shortly after the outage began.
Several digital services—including online games like League of Legends, cryptocurrency exchanges, and cloud platforms such as AWS and Microsoft Azure—experienced partial or full service interruptions. Some U.S. transportation systems and credit rating services were also affected.
Cloudflare stated that an unexpected spike of abnormal traffic caused errors in parts of its network. While the company confirmed service stabilization beginning around 11:30 p.m., it stressed that the exact cause of the traffic surge remains unknown. A follow-up fix was applied at 11:42 p.m., and Cloudflare later noted that most issues had been resolved, though some restoration work continued into early November 19.
DownDetector also noted that related error reports peaked at over 11,000 and gradually decreased as services recovered. The incident highlights how even minor failures in global infrastructure providers can rapidly escalate into widespread online disruption.
