The widespread global outage that disrupted access to hundreds of major websites, including X (formerly Twitter), ChatGPT, Spotify, and Canva, on Tuesday (November 18, 2025), has been officially resolved by Cloudflare.
The internet infrastructure company confirmed that a fix was implemented, and core services are now largely operating normally, although some minor intermittent issues related to Cloudflare's dashboard or API access may persist as the network fully stabilizes.
Cause of the Outage: A Latent Bug
Cloudflare's Chief Technology Officer, Dane Knecht, confirmed that the massive disruption was not caused by a cyberattack or malicious activity.
- Root Cause: A "latent bug" (a flaw hidden in software that is only triggered under specific conditions) in a service underpinning their bot mitigation system.
- Trigger: A routine configuration change caused a key configuration file to grow unexpectedly large, crashing the system that handles traffic for core services.
Engineers quickly identified the problem, stopped the propagation of the oversized file, and implemented a fix, leading to a quick recovery for the majority of affected websites.
The Scale of Disruption
The incident demonstrated the crucial role Cloudflare plays in the modern internet ecosystem. As a content delivery network (CDN), DNS provider, and security layer, its failure caused a cascade of problems globally.
- "500 Internal Server Error"
- "Please unblock https://www.google.com/search?q=challenges.cloudflare.com to proceed" (indicating Cloudflare's security challenge system itself was failing)
The swift resolution brought popular services back online, easing the "massive digital gridlock" that had affected millions of users and businesses worldwide.
The Cloudflare outage on November 18, 2025, provides a powerful reminder of how interconnected the internet's infrastructure is.
Comments
Post a Comment