Connectivity

Cloudflare issues an update to address outage

18 November 2025
2 minutes
Cloudflare has further responded to this afternoon’s incident that caused an internet outage via a statement.
Nov 2, 2019 San Francisco / CA / USA - Exterior view of Cloudflare headquarters; Cloudflare, Inc. is an Ameircan web infrastructure and website security company
Nov 2, 2019 San Francisco / CA / USA - Exterior view of Cloudflare headquarters; Cloudflare, Inc. is an Ameircan web infrastructure and website security company

The company has been investigating an incident within its networks that left websites like ChatGPT, X (formerly Twitter) and Down Detector offline as the network crashed.

While errors and latency are improving, Cloudflare said it is still receiving reports of intermittent errors. It has said it continues to monitor the situation and find solutions to boost recovery faster.

Find Cloudflare’s statement below, as received by the Capacity team:

“Many of Cloudflare’s services experienced a significant outage today beginning around 11:20 UTC. It was fully resolved at 14:30 UTC. The root cause of the outage was a configuration file that is automatically generated to manage threat traffic.

“The file grew beyond an expected size of entries and triggered a crash in the software system that handles traffic for a number of Cloudflare’s services.

“To be clear, there is no evidence that this was the result of an attack or caused by malicious activity. We expect that some Cloudflare services will be briefly degraded as traffic naturally spikes post incident but we expect all services to return to normal in the next few hours.

“A detailed explanation will be posted soon on blog.cloudflare.com. Given the importance of Cloudflare’s services, any outage is unacceptable. We apologise to our customers and the Internet in general for letting you down today.

“We will learn from today’s incident and improve.”

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