Network services company Cloudflare, which helps websites defend themselves against distributed denial of service attacks, experienced a large global outage on Tuesday.
From around 13:30 on 18 November 2025, websites around the world that rely on Cloudflare’s services faced downtime due to problems on its network.
Roughly twenty minutes after the problems started, the company notified users that it was experiencing “an internal service degradation.”
“Some services may be intermittently impacted. We are focused on restoring service. We will update as we are able to remediate. More updates to follow shortly,” it said.
Outage tracker Downdetector was impacted by the outage, as were various AI platforms, including OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Anthropic’s Claude.
Twitter/X was also impacted. Its website loaded, but feeds would not populate with tweets. Users also couldn’t post to the social media network.
Several of South Africa’s largest websites were impacted by the incident, including BusinessTech, Daily Maverick, IOL, and MyBroadband.
Other services were also impacted, including the SABC’s streaming service, SABC+, and various radio station websites such as Jacaranda FM, East Coast Radio, and Primedia+ (702 and CapeTalk).
At 15:09, Cloudflare announced that it had identified the issue and was implementing a fix. Fifty minutes later, it said it was still working on restoring service for application services customers.
At 16:34, it provided a further update: “We’ve deployed a change which has restored dashboard services. We are still working to remediate broad application services impact.”
At 16:42, Cloudflare said the issue had been fixed: “A fix has been implemented and we believe the incident is now resolved. We are continuing to monitor for errors to ensure all services are back to normal.”
MyBroadband contacted Cloudflare for comment, and a spokesperson said it saw an unusual spike in traffic to one of its services beginning at 13:20.
“That caused some traffic passing through Cloudflare’s network to experience errors. We do not yet know the cause of the spike in unusual traffic,” the spokesperson said.
“We are all hands on deck to make sure all traffic is served without errors. After that, we will turn our attention to investigating the cause of the unusual spike in traffic.”
Cloudflare said it would post updates to cloudflarestatus.com and more in-depth analysis when it is ready to blog.cloudflare.com.
Large-scale AWS and Azure outages
This latest global outage of what has become critical Internet infrastructure comes after Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft experienced similar outages last month.
Following the incident, Amazon revealed that AWS suffered a series of cascading failures that crashed its systems.
Its services were offline for hours, impacting everyone who relies on AWS for its applications and websites, including Zoom and privacy-centric messaging platform Signal.
Amazon Prime Video, popular game Roblox, and TFG’s online retail platform Bash were also impacted by the AWS outage.
Days later, Microsoft’s cloud platform, Azure, also experienced an outage. Microsoft later revealed that the Aisuru botnet hit its network with a 15.72 Tbps DDoS attack, launched from over 500,000 IP addresses.