Several major websites, including X and ChatGPT, experienced widespread outages on Tuesday, November 18, following significant disruptions linked to global internet infrastructure provider Cloudflare.
Beginning shortly after 11:30 GMT, thousands of users reported problems accessing platforms such as X, ChatGPT, and other online services, according to outage tracker Downdetector.
Cloudflare acknowledged the issue in a statement, confirming that it had detected “a spike in unusual traffic to one of Cloudflare’s services beginning at 11:20 UTC,” which resulted in widespread error messages for traffic passing through its systems.
The company said the source of the unusual traffic was still unknown, adding that engineers were “all hands-on deck to make sure all traffic is served without errors.”
As services slowly began to stabilise, Cloudflare announced that it had deployed a fix which restored functionality to its dashboard. However, it warned that some users might still experience intermittent issues.
On X (Twitter), some users were greeted with a message indicating an internal server problem linked to an “error” originating from Cloudflare. ChatGPT users were also hit with a notification reading: “please unblock challenges cloudflare.com to proceed.”
Even Downdetector itself briefly displayed connection errors as users tried to access outage information.
Cloudflare noted that the disruption “potentially impacts multiple customers,” adding in later updates that it was “seeing services recover” but that some organisations may continue seeing elevated error rates while remediation efforts continue.
Cloudflare provides a wide range of internet security and performance services globally, including bot detection, traffic filtering, and DDoS protection. The company says that 20% of all websites rely on its infrastructure, making the outage particularly far-reaching.
Alp Toker, director of internet-monitoring organisation NetBlocks, described the incident as “a catastrophic disruption to Cloudflare’s infrastructure,” adding that the scale of the outage highlighted how deeply much of the internet has become dependent on Cloudflare to guard against cyberattacks.
Cybersecurity expert Jake Moore of ESET said the incident underscored the risks of over-concentration among major internet service providers.
“The outages we have witnessed these last few months have once again highlighted the reliance on these fragile networks,” he said. “Companies often have little choice but to depend heavily on Cloudflare, Microsoft, and Amazon for hosting and security, because there simply aren’t many alternatives.”
The outage comes just weeks after major disruptions affected Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure, each of which temporarily knocked hundreds of websites and apps offline.
