A significant technical failure at web infrastructure giant Cloudflare triggered a cascade of outages across major online platforms on Tuesday, leaving thousands of users in the UK and worldwide unable to access popular services.
Widespread Service Disruption
The problems began around 11am on Tuesday, 18th November 2025, with social media platform X, music streaming service Spotify, and AI chatbot ChatGPT among the first services to experience issues. According to reports from Downdetector.com, other affected platforms included Facebook, Amazon Web Services (AWS), betting site bet365, design tool Canva, HR platform BrightHR, and the multiplayer game League of Legends.
At the peak of the disruption, more than 10,000 users reported problems linked directly to Cloudflare's network. Some services, including X, experienced brief periods of recovery before suffering further interruptions that were attributed to an internal server error within Cloudflare's systems.
Cloudflare's Response and Resolution
Cloudflare, which provides network and security services for approximately one-fifth of all global websites, confirmed it was experiencing what it termed an "internal service degradation." The company issued a server update acknowledging that some services might be intermittently affected.
In their statement, Cloudflare noted: "We are seeing services recover, but customers may continue to observe higher-than-normal error rates as we continue remediation efforts." The company successfully identified the root cause of the problem and began implementing a fix by 1.09pm.
The outage coincided with scheduled maintenance at Cloudflare's SCL (Santiago) data centre, though the company did not confirm if this was directly related to the service degradation.
Expert Analysis: A Pattern of Vulnerability
Graeme Stuart, head of the public sector at cybersecurity firm Check Point, provided context for the incident. "Cloudflare going down today sits in the same pattern we saw with the recent AWS and Azure outages," he explained. "These platforms are vast, efficient and used by almost every part of modern life."
Mr Stuart emphasised that the reported outages didn't occur because individual organisations failed independently, but because "a single layer they all rely on stopped responding." He highlighted a critical weakness in current internet infrastructure, noting that "many organisations still run everything through one route with no meaningful backup. When that route fails, there is no fallback."
The cybersecurity expert concluded with a sobering observation about the internet's evolution: "The internet was meant to be resilient through distribution, yet we have ended up concentrating huge amounts of global traffic into a handful of cloud providers." This concentration of dependency creates systemic vulnerability that affects millions of users simultaneously when major providers experience technical difficulties.
