Cloudflare Disrupts Parts of the Internet X (formerly Twitter) Nov. 18th 2025
Cloudflare is down this morning, causing outages at X, OpenAI, and even some online games as sporadic disruptions continue
Services from Cloudflare, a software company, underpin thousands of websites. Multi-platform outage strikes: popular web traffic security platform ‘Cloudflare’ suffered issues in the early hours of this morning, triggering downtime across popular websites and social platforms like X (formerly Twitter), as confirmed by the official Cloudflare Status page.
While it isn’t quite as devastating as the recent AWS outages, it’s still an example of how much of the web is propped up by a handful of services.
Naturally, users in the United States shouldn’t have been affected by changes to servers hosted in London, UK, but the overall red alert status nevertheless continues as Cloudflare continues to “work towards restoring other services”. For now, X remains inaccessible for many, with errors recently increasing.
With a brutal touch of irony, even downdetector, a popular downtime tracker, was initially taken offline due to its reliance on Cloudflare’s services, though it seemed to recover within only a few minutes. Others weren’t so lucky, showing “Internal server error” messages with a generic “error code 500” accompaniment.
Move over AWS, it’s Cloudflare’s turn
This downtime started around 6:00 AM ET, when Cloudflare’s ‘support portal provider’ started “experiencing issues”, which led to the degradation of Elon Musk’s social platform X, alongside popular online multiplayer video games like League of Legends, with users flocking to report issues via downdetector (at least, when it was functional).
By 7:03 AM ET, Cloudflare confirmed that its teams were “continuing to investigate this issue”, while even its status page showed signs of breaking down, losing its CSS styling. More communications came at 7:21 AM ET, claiming that Cloudflare was “seeing services recover, but customers may continue to observe higher-than-normal error rates as we continue remediation efforts.”
Ditto for around ten minutes later, and throughout the hour, as its internal investigations kept rolling, and X still sporadically fails to load.
If you were (or still are) struggling to load posts on X, you’d likely see “Something went wrong. Try reloading” messages. That’s if you ever make it past the 500 errors, just as anyone trying to create work on Canva suffers similar blocks. Even if you’re trying to play a few games of LoL or Valorant, this is likely why you couldn’t connect to any servers.
Generic messages like “Please unblock challenges.cloudflare.com to proceed” appear on several websites, including OpenAI, though access to ChatGPT seemed to recover first, with the corporate website following after.
If you still see this message while browsing the web this morning, don’t fret; you haven’t actually done anything wrong. Rather, the security systems Cloudflare provides aren’t working, though the websites they’re supposed to protect remain live in the background.
Our own team is experiencing issues with PayPal and Uber (specifically, Uber Eats), though it doesn’t appear to be as widespread as other platforms. The apps and websites themselves load, but payments and orders are intermittently affected. Ref: Ben Wilson Senior Editor Windows Central
