Nov 18, 2025 | 1:00 PM UTC
A significant portion of the global internet is experiencing disruption this afternoon as Cloudflare’s Global Network suffers from an internal service degradation. Websites and online services relying on Cloudflare’s critical infrastructure, including major platforms like X (formerly Twitter) and OpenAI (ChatGPT), are reporting widespread 500 Internal Server Errors and intermittent connectivity issues.
The incident highlights the essential, yet sometimes fragile, nature of centralized web infrastructure services upon which the modern internet heavily relies.
Timeline of the Cloudflare Incident
The problems began late this morning, with Cloudflare first acknowledging the degradation shortly before midday UTC. The incident, labeled “Cloudflare Global Network experiencing issues” on their official status page, has seen the company struggle to identify and contain the internal fault.
Here is a summary of the official updates provided by Cloudflare:
| Time (UTC) | Status Report |
| 11:48 | Initial Investigation – Cloudflare formally acknowledged an “internal service degradation” leading to intermittent impact on key services. Focus was immediately placed on service restoration. |
| 12:21 | Partial Recovery – “We are seeing services recover, but customers may continue to observe higher-than-normal error rates as we continue remediation efforts.” |
| 13:04 | Operational Measure – WARP access in London was temporarily disabled during attempts to remediate the issue. |
| 13:09 | Issue Identified – “The issue has been identified and a fix is being implemented.” |
| 13:13 | Service Recovery – “We have made changes that have allowed Cloudflare Access and WARP to recover. Error levels for Access and WARP users have returned to pre-incident rates. We have re-enabled WARP access in London.” |
| 13:35 | Ongoing Remediation – “We are continuing working on restoring service for application services customers.” |
As of the latest update at 12:53 UTC, Cloudflare is still actively investigating the root cause while continuing remediation efforts. While initial reports of massive outages have tapered off slightly, many users are still encountering the frustrating 5xx errors, indicating that the network has not fully stabilized.
The Impact on Websites and Services
Cloudflare acts as a content delivery network (CDN), DDoS mitigation provider, and DNS resolution service for millions of websites globally. When the network experiences issues, the ripple effect is immediate and widespread.
Reports across major technology news outlets indicate that the outage is causing intermittent downtime for popular services, forcing development and operations teams globally to scramble. The reliance of major web entities on a handful of infrastructure providers means even brief failures can cause cascading issues across unrelated platforms.
High-quality sources providing ongoing coverage of the event include:
- Cloudflare System Status: For the most immediate official updates on the incident, refer directly to the Cloudflare Status website.
- Tom’s Guide: Monitoring affected services and user reports in their live blog Cloudflare is down — live updates on internet outage affecting ChatGPT, X and more.
- TechRadar: Providing technical context on the degradation in their report A Cloudflare outage is taking down parts of the internet – here’s what we know so far.
Silicon Dales advises all clients and development partners to monitor the official Cloudflare status page closely for resolution confirmation.
UPDATE – table updated with latest times. This outage is ongoing, and has just passed the two hour mark. CloudFlare must be hopeful they are able to have their solution deployed globally before 9am Eastern (in 11 minutes).