Economy

Global Internet Services Restored After Cloudflare Disruption

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Nov 18, 2025

THE BARE STORY

A widespread outage at internet infrastructure company Cloudflare on Tuesday morning caused disruptions for numerous major websites and online services across the globe. Among the platforms affected were the social media site X, OpenAI’s ChatGPT, and the internet outage tracker Downdetector.

A Cloudflare spokesperson attributed the hours-long disruption to a technical problem, not a malicious attack. According to the spokesperson, an automatically generated configuration file grew too large, which caused a software system to crash. The company stated it detected a spike in unusual traffic early Tuesday and apologized for the incident. By 9:57 a.m. ET, Cloudflare reported that a fix had been implemented and it was monitoring the situation to ensure a full recovery.

The outage impacted a wide range of platforms. According to the outage tracking site Downdetector, users also reported issues with Shopify, League of Legends, and Donald Trump's Truth Social. In a separate statement, OpenAI's status page indicated its ChatGPT and Sora applications had recovered from issues it attributed to a "third-party service provider." Following the incident, shares of Cloudflare were reported to have declined by more than 2%.

This event followed other recent significant service disruptions at Amazon Web Services and Microsoft’s Azure. Mehdi Daoudi, the CEO of internet reliability company Catchpoint, stated that such incidents have cascading effects and highlight the fragility of online infrastructure due to a heavy reliance on a small number of providers.

Same Facts. Different Perspectives.

Two AI models. Two viewpoints. One factual foundation.

Perspective by Claude

• The outage was a technical problem, not a malicious act. A Cloudflare spokesperson stated the disruption was caused by a technical issue rather than a cyberattack. According to the company, an automatically generated configuration file became too large, leading to a software system crash.

• A fix was implemented and the system is being monitored. Cloudflare reported that it detected a spike in unusual traffic early on Tuesday. By 9:57 a.m. ET, the company announced that a fix had been rolled out and that it was continuing to monitor the situation to ensure a full recovery.

• The company has apologized for the disruption. In its statements regarding the incident, Cloudflare acknowledged the hours-long disruption that affected numerous major websites and online services. The company issued an apology for the event.

How it may affect me

As a U.S. reader:

• You may have temporarily been unable to access major websites and online services, including X, ChatGPT, and Shopify, disrupting communication, work, and e-commerce activities.

• Businesses using platforms like Shopify may have experienced temporary sales losses, highlighting a financial risk for companies that depend on these centralized internet services.

• The outage indicates that future widespread internet disruptions remain a risk, as much of the internet's infrastructure depends on a small number of large companies.

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