Cloudflare Speaks After Global Website Outage Disrupts X, ChatGPT, Viral Tea Websites
Cloudflare announced that it was dealing with an internal systems slowdown that was disrupting some of its services
Viral Tea Ke Writer 
Major internet infrastructure firm Cloudflare has addressed a global outage that brought down half of the world's internet on Tuesday afternoon, November 18, impacting social media apps such as X (formerly Twitter), ChatGPT, Canva, as well as many websites, including those in Kenya.
Cloudflare announced that it was dealing with an internal systems slowdown that was disrupting some of its services. “Cloudflare is experiencing an internal service degradation.
"Some services may be intermittently impacted. We are focused on restoring service. We will update as we are able to remediate,” the company noted on its status page.
People trying to access affected platforms were met with error notices like “internal server error” and “there is an internal server error on Cloudflare's network.”
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Screenshot of an internal server error that affected Cloudflare as of November 18, 2025. /VIRAL TEA KE
Outage tracker Downdetector showed issues starting at 2.16 pm, with incident reports rising rapidly from just two cases to thousands by 2.46 pm. By 4 pm, Cloudflare shared another update: “We are continuing to work on restoring service for application services customers.”
After a massive portion of the internet went offline Tuesday evening, Cloudflare Chief Technology Officer (CTO) Dane Knecht went online to explain the root cause of the global disruption.
“I won’t mince words: earlier today, we failed our customers and the broader Internet when a problem in the Cloudflare network impacted large amounts of traffic that rely on us. The sites, businesses, and organizations that rely on Cloudflare depend on us being available, and I apologize for the impact that we caused," he stated on his X account.
He, however, stressed that it was "not an attack." “Transparency about what happened matters, and we plan to share a breakdown with more details in a few hours."
"In short, a latent bug in a service underpinning our bot mitigation capability started to crash after a routine configuration change we made. That cascaded into a broad degradation of our network and other services. This was not an attack,” he continued.
He admitted that both the outage and the slow resolution were unacceptable, adding, "Work is already underway to make sure it does not happen again, but I know it caused real pain today. The trust our customers place in us is what we value the most, and we are going to do what it takes to earn that back.”
The outage also crippled many major news websites, including Viral Tea, rendering them unable to publish real-time news content as has been the norm daily. It also affected games such as League of Legends and Valorant, as well as Spotify and even Downdetector itself.
Surprisingly, Meta apps including Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram and Threads as well as LinkedIn were not affected by the outage.
What Is Cloudflare?
Cloudflare is one of the world’s largest internet infrastructure providers, powering everything from small blogs to major global platforms.
The company offers a mix of security, traffic management, and performance tools that help websites load faster, stay secure, and handle massive volumes of users. Because it operates as a protective and routing layer between websites and the public, millions of organisations, ours included, rely on its network to stay online.
When Cloudflare experiences an outage, the impact is immediate and far-reaching. The company’s systems sit at a critical point in the global internet ecosystem, meaning even a brief disruption can trigger widespread loading failures across countless websites and apps.
During outages, users typically encounter error messages, stalled services, and inaccessible platforms — issues that ripple across sectors including media, e-commerce, finance, and government services.
Given Cloudflare’s central role in global web traffic, any breakdown in its operations effectively disrupts a significant portion of the internet, making such incidents highly consequential worldwide.
As global banking, shopping, and daily services increasingly depend on the internet, cyber-resilience specialists say the web’s backbone has become overly concentrated in the hands of a few dominant firms, creating a risky “dependency chain.”
Cloudflare’s issues follow similar disruptions at Amazon’s AWS and Microsoft’s Azure, less than a month ago, the former had impacted Canva as well as Snapchat, Duolingo, Roblox, Coinbase, Amazon Alexa, Crunchyroll, Fortnite, PUBG, Apple TV, and The New York Times.
Alongside Google Cloud, these tech giants control roughly two-thirds of the infrastructure that supports the digital economy. Analysts say the recent outages underscore the need for a more diverse mix of providers to mitigate vulnerability.
