A routine online banking check turned into a day of frustration for Eugene Svboda yesterday, as a grey error screen from a company called Cloudflare blocked his access. This single incident was a microcosm of a global digital blackout that disrupted millions.
What caused the global internet disruption?
On November 19, 2025, starting around 11am, users worldwide began experiencing problems with major websites and apps. The culprit was a significant outage at Cloudflare, a company that acts as a critical shield and traffic manager for a vast portion of the internet. According to the outage tracker Downdetector, which itself was briefly knocked offline, services including X, ChatGPT, PayPal, and League of Legends were affected for up to four hours.
The technical failure occurred when engineers made a change to the system that verifies whether a user is human or a bot. This system creates a 'file' for verification, but the update caused it to duplicate the file uncontrollably, ultimately leading to a crash that brought down a swathe of the web.
The widespread impact of the outage
Luke Kehoe, an industry analyst from Ookla, the company behind Downdetector, provided Metro with stark figures. The outage impacted approximately 3.3 million people globally. The geographical breakdown was led by the United States with over 823,000 reports, followed by the United Kingdom with over 284,000 reports. Germany, Brazil, Japan, the Netherlands, Poland, France, Canada, and Italy were also severely affected.
This incident is the latest in a worrying trend of centralised failures. Just last month, an Amazon Web Services data centre issue took 2,000 sites offline, and days later, Microsoft's Azure cloud service suffered an eight-hour outage. Lee Skillen, CTO of Cloudsmith, emphasised the scale of the problem, noting that 20% of the web runs through Cloudflare's network.
Are we too reliant on a fragile digital ecosystem?
Experts unanimously agree that modern society's dependency on a handful of tech providers is a critical vulnerability. Benjamin Schilz, CEO of Wire, stated, 'Modern society is built on the assumption that connectivity never fails. The problem isn't the Cloudflare outage itself. It's the brutal dependency we've created.'
While a complete, permanent shutdown of the entire internet is highly unlikely due to its decentralised design, regional blackouts do occur, often due to government action or conflict, as seen recently in Ukraine. However, the real threat lies in our consolidated infrastructure. Kashif Nazir of Cloudhouse summarised it starkly: 'The internet was designed to survive nuclear war, but we've essentially re-centralised it and handed the keys to five companies. When Cloudflare goes down, for millions of users, the internet is effectively down.'
Dr Stilianos Vidalis from the University of Hertfordshire warned of the catastrophic potential of a major cyber attack, like a modern version of the 1988 'Morris worm'. Such an event could collapse communications, halt financial transactions, and cripple the globalised economy, leaving cash as the only viable payment method. Thankfully, he notes that the internet's built-in resilience makes this scenario highly improbable, but the fragility exposed by yesterday's outage is a powerful reminder of our digital world's precarious foundations.
