Cloudflare Outage Knocks X, Spotify, ChatGPT Offline
A major Cloudflare outage early Tuesday, November 18, caused disruptions across large portions of the internet, affecting access to major platforms including X, Spotify, OpenAI services, and multiple other high-traffic websites. The incident, which began around 5:20 a.m. EST, led to loading errors, service interruptions, and login failures for thousands of users worldwide.
Cloudflare, a widely used internet infrastructure provider that supports website performance and security, confirmed the issue and said its systems “experienced a significant outage” during the early morning hours. The company reported that the issues were fully resolved by 9:30 a.m. EST.
Cloudflare: “No Evidence of an Attack”
In a statement, Cloudflare emphasized that the outage did not appear to be the result of hacking or targeted interference. “To be clear, there is no evidence that this was the result of an attack or caused by malicious activity,” the company said.
Cloudflare added that although core services were restored by mid-morning, some lingering performance slowdowns were likely as internet traffic surged back to normal levels. “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,” the statement continued.
Earlier in the morning, the company said it was “all hands on deck” as engineers worked to stabilize traffic routing and restore impacted systems.
Configuration Error Identified as Root Cause
Cloudflare later shared preliminary findings about what triggered the disruption. According to the company, “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.”
That crash appears to have had cascading effects, interrupting normal operations for websites that rely on Cloudflare for load balancing, security filtering, and traffic management. The company said a more detailed technical explanation will be published on its blog following a full internal review.
Major Websites Impacted
Because Cloudflare serves as a backbone provider for a substantial portion of the internet, disruptions quickly spread across multiple sectors, including entertainment, social media, e-commerce, and workplace software.
According to outage-tracking site Downdetector—which itself experienced intermittent issues tied to the event—thousands of users reported problems accessing popular platforms between 7 a.m. and 9 a.m. EST. Among the most heavily affected were:
X (formerly Twitter)
Spotify
ChatGPT and other OpenAI tools
Character AI
Canva
Uber
Zoom
Letterboxd
Google Store
Square
Indeed
Quizlet
League of Legends
Dayforce
Rover
Truth Social
Grindr
Archive of Our Own
Ikea
Reports ranged from complete outages to slow load times, login failures, and errors associated with Cloudflare gateway timeouts. The outages were inconsistent depending on region, device, and traffic volume, with some users regaining access sooner than others.
Internet Backbone Highlighted by Outage
Cloudflare is one of the most widely used infrastructure providers in the world. Its services include content delivery, network security, traffic optimization, and protection against cyberattacks. Millions of websites and applications rely on Cloudflare to manage daily operations, meaning even brief disruptions can ripple across the internet.
The company acknowledged the magnitude of the outage in its public apology. “Given the importance of Cloudflare’s services, any outage is unacceptable. We apologize to our customers and the Internet in general for letting you down today. We will learn from today’s incident and improve.”
The incident underscores the growing reliance on third-party infrastructure providers—and the vulnerability that exists when a single point of failure affects large swaths of web traffic.
Services Return as Monitoring Continues
Cloudflare said the outage was fully resolved by 9:30 a.m. EST, with most services expected to stabilize throughout the morning. The company’s status website continues to provide updates, and a full postmortem will be published at blog.cloudflare.com once the internal review is complete.
As of Tuesday afternoon, Downdetector reports indicate that most affected platforms have returned to normal functionality.
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