Cloudflare Global Outage: Internal Threat-Traffic Configuration Failure
The outage impacted a broad range of dependent platforms globally, including social media networks, artificial intelligence (AI) services, streaming platforms, delivery applications.
GLOBAL — Cloudflare experienced a major worldwide service disruption on November 18, 2025, with degradation first publicly acknowledged at 11:48 a.m. and full resolution declared at 7:28 p.m.
The root cause was an automatically generated configuration file for threat traffic that grew far beyond expected size, triggering crashes in multiple traffic-handling systems. Recovery was achieved through staged fixes deployed progressively during the afternoon and evening.
As of late November 18, 2025 (post-resolution), all services are fully operational with no recurring issues observed. The outage impacted a broad range of dependent platforms globally, including social media networks, artificial intelligence (AI) services, streaming platforms, delivery applications, collaboration tools, and countless enterprise services.
Peak error rates and latency spikes occurred between approximately 11:20 a.m. and 2:42 p.m. Cloudflare has confirmed the incident was entirely internal in origin, with no evidence of external attack or malicious activity. Initial details have been released; a comprehensive post-mortem is expected shortly.
What is Cloudflare and Why Does It Matter?
Cloudflare is one of the world’s largest and most critical internet infrastructure companies. It operates as a global reverse proxy, content delivery network (CDN), DDoS mitigation platform, DNS provider, and zero-trust security service.
In practical terms, Cloudflare sits between roughly 20–25% of all internet traffic worldwide, acting as the first line of defense and performance optimization for millions of websites and applications.
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