Cloudflare Global Outage Disrupts X, ChatGPT, and Crypto Platforms Worldwide

Global Network Down

Cloudflare experienced a significant global network outage on November 18, 2025, beginning at approximately 11:48 UTC, that disrupted access to major platforms including X (formerly Twitter), ChatGPT, and numerous cryptocurrency exchanges. The internet infrastructure giant, which serves over 13,000 networks across 330 cities, reported widespread HTTP 500 errors affecting its dashboard, API, and edge network services.

Cascading Failures

The outage had a domino effect across the internet, taking down services ranging from gaming platforms like League of Legends and Valorant to productivity tools and even Downdetector itself, the very site people use to check for outages. Users encountered error messages stating "internal server error on Cloudflare's network," leaving them unable to access sites and services despite those platforms being operational in the background. The crypto sector was particularly hard hit, with multiple exchange front-ends going offline simultaneously.

Emergency Measures

Cloudflare took drastic remediation steps during the incident, disabling WARP access in London at 13:04 UTC to help restore services. By 12:21 UTC, the company reported services beginning to recover, though customers continued experiencing higher than normal error rates. The timing coincided with scheduled maintenance at multiple data centers, including Santiago, Tahiti, Los Angeles, and Atlanta, though Cloudflare has not confirmed whether these maintenance windows contributed to the broader network failure.

Recovery and Investigation

As of 13:09 UTC, Cloudflare identified the root cause and began implementing a fix, with services gradually returning to normal operation. The company provided regular updates through its status page, issuing bulletins approximately every 15 minutes during the peak crisis. European nodes in cities including Bucharest, Zurich, Warsaw, Oslo, Amsterdam, Berlin, Frankfurt, and Vienna were confirmed down during the incident. Downdetector received tens of thousands of reports, with X alone generating over 9,700 outage complaints.