Lafayette, California, November 18, 2025, A person’s hand holds an iPhone that displays a Cloudflare error when trying to access a web page during a Cloudflare service outage.
Smith Collection/Gado | Archive Photos | Getty Images
internet infrastructure company cloudflare suffered an outage on Tuesday that took several major websites offline to users around the world.
Many sites were back online within hours. In an update to its status page around 9:57 a.m. ET, Cloudflare said it had implemented a fix to resolve the issue, but said some users may still experience issues accessing their online dashboard.
“We continue to monitor errors to ensure all services are back to normal,” the company added.
e-commerce platform ShopifySites affected by the Cloudflare issue include job search engine Indeed, Anthropic’s Claude chatbot, President Donald Trump’s Truth Social, Elon Musk’s social media platform X, and some users were temporarily unable to access Cloudflare itself, according to Downdetector. The outage caused some of the New Jersey Department of Transportation’s digital services to go down.
OpenAI’s status page shows that ChatGPT and its short-form video app Sora have fully recovered after experiencing an issue with a “third-party service provider.”
A Cloudflare spokesperson said the “root cause” of the outage was an automatically generated configuration file used to manage threat traffic that “exceeded the expected entry size,” causing a crash of the software system that handles traffic for several services.
The company announced that it began observing an “unusual spike in traffic” around 5:20 a.m. Eastern Time.
There is no evidence that this outage was the result of an attack or caused by malicious activity, the spokesperson added.
“Given the criticality of Cloudflare’s services, any outage is unacceptable,” the spokesperson said. “We would like to apologize to our customers and the internet in general for letting them down today.”
Cloudflare’s software is used by many companies around the world and helps manage and secure approximately 20% of the web’s traffic. Some of the services we provide help prevent distributed denial-of-service attacks (attacks in which a malicious attacker overloads a website’s systems with so many traffic requests that it becomes unable to function).
Cloudflare stock fell more than 2%.
The problem occurs less than a month later. Amazon Web services suffered a day-long disruption that brought down numerous online services, followed by a worldwide outage. microsoftAzure cloud and 365 services.
In July 2024, a flawed software upgrade by cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike caused a widespread outage, temporarily halting flights, impacting financial services and forcing hospitals to delay procedures.
