On 18 November 2025, a massive Cloudflare outage disrupted some of the most popular services on the internet, including ChatGPT, X (formerly Twitter), Canva, Spotify, and more. The culprit? A latent bug in Cloudflare’s system, according to company insiders.
Here’s a breakdown of what happened, why it caused such widespread disruption, and what Cloudflare is doing to prevent a repeat.
What Happened During the Outage
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Widespread Service Disruption
The outage began early on Tuesday morning and affected a number of high-profile platforms. Users reported error messages such as “500 Internal Server Error” and “please unblock challenges.cloudflare.com to proceed.” -
Root Cause: Latent Bug
Cloudflare traced the issue to a “latent bug” — a flaw in its bot mitigation system that had gone undetected until a routine configuration change triggered it. -
Configuration File Overload
The configuration file that Cloudflare uses to manage threat traffic grew far larger than expected. Once it exceeded safe limits, it crashed the internal service responsible for handling critical traffic flows. -
Not a Hack or Attack
Cloudflare was quick to clarify this was not an attack. According to its CTO, Dane Knecht, the disruption stemmed from internal software failure — not malicious activity. -
Fix Implemented
By late morning (ET), Cloudflare said it had rolled out a fix. The company reported that error rates were dropping and many services were returning to normal. -
Atonement from Cloudflare
Knecht issued a public apology:“Earlier today we failed our customers and the broader Internet … a latent bug in our bot mitigation capability started to crash … This was not an attack. Work is already underway to make sure it doesn’t happen again.”
Why the Bug Was So Disruptive
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Critical Role of Cloudflare: Cloudflare powers about 20% of the web, serving as both a content delivery network (CDN) and security shield for many sites. When its core services go down, the ripple effects are massive.
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Bot Mitigation System Is Central: The affected system is not a minor part — it helps manage suspicious traffic and protects websites from abuse. When this fails, many dependent services can’t route traffic properly.
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Latent Bug = Hidden Risk: A latent bug is a defect that stays under the radar until specific conditions trigger it. In this case, a routine change was enough to activate it.
Services Hit Hard
Some of the major platforms disrupted included:
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ChatGPT – AI conversations were disrupted.
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X (Twitter) – widespread connectivity issues.
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Canva – users couldn't access design tools.
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Learning Tools: Many students relying on Cloudflare-powered services faced disruption.
What’s Next: Cloudflare’s Path Forward
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Internal Review: Cloudflare says it will conduct a deep post-mortem to understand exactly how the bug slipped into production.
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Improving Testing: Expect stricter checks on critical configuration changes, especially for systems that handle security-related traffic.
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More Transparency: The company has promised to release a detailed breakdown of the outage once its investigation is complete.
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Rebuilding Trust: With such a broad impact, Cloudflare knows it needs to restore confidence in its infrastructure — and quickly.
Final Take
The 2025 Cloudflare outage is a strong reminder of how much modern internet services depend on a few key players. A hidden bug in a critical system brought down major apps and websites — not because of a cyberattack, but because of internal complexity. As Cloudflare works to fix and prevent such issues, this incident may reshape how companies think about resilience, testing, and infrastructure risk.
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