The internet experienced a disruption on November 18th, 2025, after Cloudflare, a US internet infrastructure firm, had a major internal failure that affected its global network, which affected millions of people and obstructed a wide range of services, ranging from social platforms and AI tools. Websites, including X and ChatGPT, have gone down for some users due to a glitch.
Thousands of users began reporting issues with the sites, as well as other services, to outage monitoring site Downdetector shortly after 11:30 GMT on Tuesday.
Cloudflare said in a statement it had seen "a spike in unusual traffic to one of Cloudflare's services beginning at 11:20 UTC," which had caused errors for traffic passing through its network."We do not yet know the cause of the spike in unusual traffic," it said, adding, "We are all hands on deck to make sure all traffic is served without errors."
On its homepage, X is displaying a message for some users saying there is a problem with its internal server, as a result of an "error" originating with Cloudflare.
ChatGPT's site was also displaying an error message telling some users, "Please unblock challenges cloudflare.com to proceed."
Cloudflare said in an earlier note on its service status dashboard that the issues it was experiencing "potentially impact multiple customers".
In updates since it was added, it was "seeing services recover," but some customers "may continue to observe higher-than-normal error rates as we continue remediation efforts".
Cloudflare is a company that provides web security and a Content Delivery Network (CDN) to protect websites from hacks and speed them up. It operates a massive global network that sits between a user and a website’s server, delivering content quickly while filtering out malicious traffic to improve performance and security.
