A significant internet outage on Tuesday, 18th November 2025, caused widespread disruption across major online platforms including the social media site X, music streaming service Spotify, and the AI chatbot ChatGPT.
Widespread Service Disruption
The problems began around 11am, with more than 10,000 people reporting issues linked to the web infrastructure and security company Cloudflare. According to data from Downdetector.com, other affected services included Facebook, AWS (Amazon Web Services), bet365, Canva, BrightHR, and the popular multiplayer game League of Legends.
Some websites, including X, experienced a brief period of recovery before being hit by further problems. Cloudflare attributed the ongoing instability to an "internal server error" on its own network.
Cloudflare's Response and Resolution
In a server update, the company confirmed it was "experiencing an internal service degradation." They warned that some services might be intermittently affected and that customers could continue to see higher-than-normal error rates even as remediation efforts were underway.
The scale of the outage was significant due to Cloudflare's pivotal role in the global internet ecosystem. The company provides network and security services that help websites and applications operate, with approximately a fifth of all global websites relying on some of its services.
By 1.09pm, Cloudflare announced it had identified the root cause of the problem and was in the process of implementing a fix. The incident coincided with scheduled maintenance at the company's SCL (Santiago) data centre.
Expert Analysis on Internet Fragility
Graeme Stuart, head of the public sector at cybersecurity firm Check Point, provided context for the failure. He stated, "Cloudflare going down today sits in the same pattern we saw with the recent AWS and Azure outages. These platforms are vast, efficient and used by almost every part of modern life."
He explained that the reported outages were not due to individual organisational failures, but because a single, critical layer they all depend on stopped responding. "When a platform of this size slips, the impact spreads far and fast and everyone feels it at once," Stuart added.
He highlighted a fundamental weakness in modern web architecture, noting that many organisations run everything through a single route without a meaningful backup. "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," he concluded, pointing to a systemic issue that makes the global internet vulnerable to single points of failure.
