Cloudflare, a leading internet infrastructure and security company, encountered a technical issue that caused widespread disruptions across several major platforms, including ChatGPT, Perplexity, and X (formerly Twitter).
Cloudflare has acknowledged the issue on its status page, saying: “On 18 November 2025 at 11:20 UTC, Cloudflare’s network began experiencing significant failures to deliver core network traffic. This showed up to Internet users trying to access our customers’ sites as an error page indicating a failure within Cloudflare’s network.”
“The issue was not caused, directly or indirectly, by a cyber attack or malicious activity of any kind. Instead, it was triggered by a change to one of our database systems’ permissions which caused the database to output multiple entries into a “feature file” used by our Bot Management system. That feature file, in turn, doubled in size. The larger-than-expected feature file was then propagated to all the machines that make up our network,” it added.
The company also mentioned that errors continued until the underlying issue was identified and resolved starting at 14:30. It solved the problem by stopping the generation and propagation of the bad feature file and manually inserting a known good file into the feature file distribution queue. And then forcing a restart of our core proxy.
Affected users were shown a notification stating that an “internal server error on Cloudflare’s network” had occurred, along with a prompt asking them to “please try again in a few minutes.”
Cloudflare later updated its status page to confirm that the issue had been resolved and that it would continue monitoring for any further errors.
“A fix has been implemented and we believe the incident is now resolved. We are continuing to monitor for errors to ensure all services are back to normal. We’ve deployed a change which has restored dashboard services. We are still working to remediate broad application services impact,” it mentioned.
Cloudflare outage hit several major platforms including:
- X
- Spotify
- OpenAI services including ChatGPT
- Perplexity
- Gemini
- Bet365
- Letterboxd
- League of Legends
- Sage
Cloudflare is an internet infrastructure company that provides essential technologies powering today’s online experiences, including tools that safeguard websites from cyberattacks and keep them running smoothly even during heavy traffic.
