Major Cloudflare Outage Disrupts X, ChatGPT, and Bet365

A significant technical failure at internet infrastructure giant Cloudflare has triggered a widespread outage, bringing dozens of popular apps and websites to a standstill.

Widespread Disruption Across the Web

The problems began on November 18, 2025, and persisted for over two hours with no immediate resolution in sight. Visitors to affected sites, including X (formerly Twitter), OpenAI's ChatGPT, and the film review community Letterboxd, were met with error messages indicating a problem with Cloudflare's service.

One recurring error message seen by users read: “Please unblock challenges.cloudflare.com to proceed.” Meanwhile, users attempting to access the betting site Bet365 were confronted with a more alarming notice stating, “Sorry, you have been blocked. You are unable to access bet365.com,” alongside text suggesting they might be a security threat.

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Growing List of Affected Services

According to the tracking website Down Detector, the list of services experiencing problems continued to grow throughout the incident. The outage impacted a diverse range of platforms, from the shopping app Vinted and the dating app Grindr to essential services like Virgin Media, EE, and Amazon Web Services.

Cloudflare has issued a series of updates confirming it is “continuing working on restoring service,” but has provided no specific timeline for a full recovery. The lack of a concrete ETA has left millions of users in the UK and beyond unable to access critical digital services.

A Digital Domino Effect

The incident highlights the internet's reliance on a few key infrastructure providers. When a central service like Cloudflare experiences issues, it creates a domino effect, crippling a vast array of unrelated websites and applications that depend on its technology for security and performance.

The full list of reported affected services includes: