Widespread Cloudflare outage took many sites offline, but appears to be fixed
The problem knocked services offline including X, OpenAI and Downdetector.
If you experienced internet issues this morning, you're far from alone. Infrastructure company Cloudflare was hit with what it called "widespread 500 errors, [with] Dashboard and API also failing." Fortunately, those issues were resolved a few hours later, but it still led to a bit of chaos online as the US east coast got its day started.
"Cloudflare is aware of, and investigating an issue which potentially impacts multiple customers," the company wrote in a status update around 7AM ET. "We are working to understand the full impact and mitigate this problem."
As of 9:50AM ET this morning, Cloudflare said that the issue had been resolved. The company's CTO Dane Knecht shared the following statement on X, apologizing for the issues and saying the company would share details on what went wrong later today.
I won't mince words: earlier today we failed our customers and the broader Internet when a problem in @Cloudflare network impacted large amounts of traffic that rely on us. The sites, businesses, and organizations that rely on Cloudflare depend on us being available and I...
— Dane Knecht 🦭 (@dok2001) November 18, 2025
Cloudflare is a key internet hub providing network and security products for internet service providers, fortune 500 businesses and others. Those include "edge computing" and tools to protect websites from cyberattacks and help them stay online during distributed denial of service (DDOS) attacks and heavy traffic periods.
The issue has affected numerous sites including X, OpenAI, Spotify, Letterboxd and, ironically, Downdetector — a site that can normally tell you which other websites are down. Affected sites may display a message indicating an "internal server error on Cloudflare's network," and request that you "try again in a few minutes."
7 Updates
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Cloudflare's CTO shared a statement on X, apologizing and saying that the company would share details on what happened later today. He also noted that the issue was not an attack on the company's systems.
"I won't mince words: earlier today we failed our customers and the broader Internet when a problem in the Cloudflare network impacted large amounts of traffic that rely on us," he said. "The sites, businesses, and organizations that rely on Cloudflare depend on us being available and I apologize for the impact that we caused."
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Cloudflare says that 'we believe the incident is now resolved'
This morning's Cloudflare outage appears to be mitigated, at least according to the company. Its latest status update at 9:42 AM ET says "we believe the incident is now resolved" and that it'll be monitoring for any further disruptions. Hopefully everyone can move on with their day on a functioning internet!
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Currently seeing double.
The latest Cloudflare status updates.
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The latest update is not exactly the meatiest. Cloudflare is "continuing working on restoring service for application services customers." Despite the last update, plenty of sites are still throwing up the error screen, including X. (At least, that's the case here in New England.)
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Downdetector showing that X, Spotify and other sites are starting to return to normal
Downdetector, which was down itself not a half hour ago, is now reporting that sites affected by the Cloudflare outage like X and Spotify are returning to normal. However, X still appears to be down for multiple Engadget editors.
Downdetector chart for X (Twitter) shows the site returning to normal
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Cloudflare wrote that "the issue has been identified."
Cloudflare said at 8:13 ET that "the issue has been identified and a fix is being implemented." The company added that "we have made changes that have allowed Cloudflare Access and WARP to recover. Error levels for Access and WARP users have returned to pre-incident rates."
(WARP is a service that gives clients speedy access to Cloudflare.)
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Cloudflare has confirmed an "internal service degradation"
Cloudflare's internal status page confirmed a disruption at 6:48AM ET.
Cloudflare is having issues.