WhyNoWeb

WhyNoWeb — Launch Edition

Date: 18 November 2025

Introduction

In light of today's significant outage affecting Cloudflare, we are launching a dedicated section in our newsletter to provide developers and webmasters with timely updates on major internet outages. This initiative aims to enhance awareness of the fragility of our infrastructure, emphasizing the ripple effects of disruptions across services that rely heavily on a limited number of providers.

Today's Major Outage: Cloudflare (18 November 2025)

Summary

A major outage at Cloudflare was reported by multiple monitoring platforms, starting around 06:40 AM ET (≈ 11:40 UTC) and escalating around 12:30 UTC. The issue has predominantly impacted global edge network traffic, affecting multiple regions, including:

• Africa

• Asia

• Europe

• Latin America & the Caribbean

• Middle East

• Oceania

• North America (notably Detroit, Norfolk, and Anchorage)

The failure is characterized by widespread HTTP 500 Internal Server Errors for websites and services relying on Cloudflare’s infrastructure.

Official Cloudflare Acknowledgment

Cloudflare confirmed the incident on their status page at 06:40 AM ET, stating:

> “We are working to understand the full impact and mitigate this problem. More updates to follow shortly.”

Third-party status aggregators have classified this as a Major Outage, with traffic rerouting observed across all major global regions. As of now, Cloudflare has not provided detailed root-cause analysis or an estimated time for full resolution.

Customer Impact

Services dependent on Cloudflare (CDN, DNS, edge proxies) have experienced intermittent failures, affecting large platforms such as X (formerly Twitter) and ChatGPT. Users have reported errors like “Internal Server Error on Cloudflare’s network — please try again in a few minutes.” This incident highlights the extensive reliance on Cloudflare’s global infrastructure and the potential for cascading failures across a variety of services, including social media, SaaS, gaming, and design tools.

Monitoring Actions

We are closely tracking the following:

• Updates from Cloudflare's official status page and incident tracker.

• Traffic routing and edge-fabric behavior via Cloudflare Radar and other routing-monitoring tools.

• The duration of the incident and any lingering degraded performance post-recovery.

• Post-mortem reports or root-cause analyses from Cloudflare, including strategies for incident prevention.

Recommendations for Developers and Webmasters

If your applications or services rely on Cloudflare, consider the following:

• Post-Recovery Vigilance: Assume there may be residual impacts even after the initial recovery.

• Review Contingency Plans: Evaluate your fallback strategies, including alternative DNS providers and CDN failover paths.

• Stakeholder Communication: Ensure your customers are aware that this outage was not localized, but rather a global event affecting core infrastructure.

• Log Monitoring: Keep an eye on your service logs for unusual spikes in errors or latency that might correlate with this disruption.

Historical Context: Recent Major Cloudflare Outages

While Cloudflare has a reputation for reliability, recent notable incidents provide critical insights:

• 12 September 2025: Dashboard & API failure due to a bug that overloaded internal APIs for approximately 90 minutes, although the data-plane remained largely unaffected.

• 2 November 2023: A short but impactful network issue disrupted thousands of sites for around 20 minutes.

• 21 June 2022: A configuration error resulted in a major data-plane outage lasting approximately 1.5 hours, affecting Workers, Zero Trust, and numerous large websites.

• 18 March 2024: Routing problems in the China region caused performance degradation across multiple areas.

These incidents underscore that even leading infrastructure providers can experience failures and that outages significantly differ in severity and scope. Organizations must prioritize redundancy, fallback strategies, and proactive monitoring.

Conclusion

This inaugural entry in our Major Outage Highlights series aims to provide you with:

• A concise summary of major incidents

• Regional and service impact details

• Provider statements and root-cause outcomes (when available)

• Lessons learned and recommended mitigations

We are committed to keeping you informed. If you would like us to expand this section with competitor outage tracking or broader industry incident analytics, please reach out.