Cloudflare down: What we know about the outage so far
UPDATE Tuesday, Nov. 18, 11:33 a.m. ET: Cloudflare confirmed it had fully resolved the issue causing outages on Tuesday. This morning's Clouflare outage caused widespread errors across popular services, apps, and websites.
The company wrote in an emailed statement to Mashable that the outages stemmed from a crash in a software system that handles traffic, while adding that there was no evidence it was caused by malicious activity.
Read the statement:
"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 apologize to our customers and the Internet in general for letting you down today. We will learn from today's incident and improve."
UPDATE Tuesday, Nov. 18, 10:28 a.m. ET: It appeared Cloudflare's issues were nearing a full resolution on Tuesday.
"A fix has been implemented and we believe the incident is now resolved," read a recent status update from the company. "We are continuing to monitor for errors to ensure all services are back to normal."
User-reported issues on Downdetector did appear to be quickly falling off. (Disclosure: Downdetector is owned by Ziff Davis, the same parent company as Mashable.)
The company noted in a more recent update that some Cloudflare users may still be experiencing login issues, but that it is working on a fix.
UPDATE Tuesday, Nov. 18, 9:18 a.m. ET: Cloudflare confirmed it was experiencing serious issues on Tuesday morning, noting in an emailed statement to Mashable that the root cause appeared to be "a spike in unusual traffic."
Read the statement from Cloudflare:
We saw a spike in unusual traffic to one of Cloudflare's services beginning at 11:20 UTC. That caused some traffic passing through Cloudflare's network to experience errors. We do not yet know the cause of the spike in unusual traffic. We are all hands on deck to make sure all traffic is served without errors. After that, we will turn our attention to investigating the cause of the unusual spike in traffic. We will post updates to cloudflarestatus.com and more in-depth analysis when it is ready to blog.cloudflare.com.
The latest status update from Cloudflare read that it was "working on restoring service for application services customers."
The internet appears to be breaking again.
On Tuesday morning, at 11:48 UTC, Cloudflare confirmed its global network is experiencing issues impacting "multiple customers."
Here's the full statement published on the site's status page.
Cloudflare Global Network experiencing issues
Investigating - Cloudflare is aware of, and investigating an issue which potentially impacts multiple customers. Further detail will be provided as more information becomes available.
Nov 18, 2025 - 11:48 UTC
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Cloudflare is a service that "powers Internet requests for millions of websites and serves 78 million HTTP requests per second on average," according to its site. In short, when Cloudflare has problems, the internet has problems. Users on X are already reporting issues, and Down Detector — the site that's normally a go-to for checking what's broken and what's not — appears to be having issues itself. (Disclosure: Ziff Davis owns both Mashable and Down Detector.)
It's worth noting this isn't the first time Cloudflare has experienced major issues. Large portions of the internet went down back in June due to Cloudflare disruption, causing problems for users of Twitch, Etsy, Discord, and Google.
Which parts of the internet are affected?
Here's a working list of all the sites and services affected by the Cloudflare outage:
Archive of Our Own
Canva
Depop
Downdetector
League of Legends
Spotify
'Please unlock Cloudflare challenges' error
Many sites impacted by the Cloudflare outage, including OpenAI.com, are displaying an error message that reads, "Please unblock challenges.cloudflare.com to proceed."
This is a developing story and will be updated as new details emerge.
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