A massive outage at Cloudflare brought down major platforms, including X (formerly Twitter), ChatGPT, and thousands of other websites on November 18, 2025, affecting millions of users worldwide and highlighting the internet's fragility when critical infrastructure fails.
The incident began around 11:48 UTC when users attempting to access affected sites encountered error messages reading "Please unblock challenges.cloudflare.com to proceed." The outage was so widespread it even took down DownDetector, the popular service people use to check if websites are down—creating an ironic catch-22 for frustrated users seeking confirmation.
Cloudflare, a content delivery network (CDN) provider that protects websites from distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks and speeds up content delivery, acknowledged the problem as an "internal service degradation" affecting its global network. The company's status page revealed a cascade of issues impacting dashboard services and application services across its infrastructure.
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| Cloudflare Status Page |
According to Cloudflare's incident timeline, engineers identified the issue and began implementing fixes around 13:09 UTC. The company successfully restored Cloudflare Access and WARP services (enterprise security tools that allow secure remote access to corporate resources), with error rates returning to normal levels. However, the recovery process required temporarily disabling WARP access in London before re-enabling it as fixes took effect.
By 14:42 UTC, Cloudflare reported that a fix had been implemented and the incident was resolved, although the company continued to monitor to ensure all services returned to normal operations.
This disruption marks the second major internet infrastructure failure in recent weeks, following a significant Amazon Web Services crash that affected Fortnite, Alexa, and Snapchat, as well as subsequent Microsoft Azure issues that knocked Xbox offline for hours.