Cloudflare Outage Takes Down X, OpenAI, and Major Internet Services
Massive Cloudflare Outage Knocks X, OpenAI, and Major Games Offline (November 2025)
TL;DR
Cloudflare experienced a major server issue, knocking out key services like X, OpenAI (ChatGPT), and major online games with widespread 500 errors. The outage highlights the internet's critical reliance on single providers. Cloudflare is recovering services, but users may observe high error rates.
A major disruption at the internet infrastructure giant Cloudflare is causing widespread outages across popular online services, including X (formerly Twitter), OpenAI's ChatGPT, and key multiplayer games. The company is actively investigating an internal server issue, with some services now recovering, but users are warned to expect higher-than-normal error rates.
The Current Situation: Widespread Internet Disruption
Beginning around 6:00 AM ET on Tuesday, November 18, reports of service degradation and "Internal server error" messages (Error Code 500) began spiking across the web.
Cloudflare, the content delivery network (CDN) and security provider that underpins a substantial portion of the modern internet, confirmed that it is "aware of, and investigating an issue which potentially impacts multiple customers."
- Key Affected Platforms:
- Social Media: X (users saw "Something went wrong" messages).
- AI/Productivity: OpenAI (access to ChatGPT and the main website was intermittently affected), Canva.
- Gaming: Popular online titles like League of Legends and Valorant reported connectivity issues.
- Outage Trackers: In a moment of stark irony, even Downdetector, a primary outage tracker, was briefly taken offline due to its reliance on Cloudflare's services.
Potential Root Cause and Cloudflare’s Response
While the precise cause of the global service degradation has not been officially confirmed, Cloudflare noted that scheduled maintenance in the SCL (Santiago) datacenter was planned for the same time period. Infrastructure experts suggest that issues tied to maintenance or traffic re-routing across its global data centers often trigger these widespread incidents.
Latest Updates (as of [Insert Current Time/Date]):
- 7:21 AM ET: Cloudflare stated that it was "seeing services recover, but customers may continue to observe higher-than-normal error rates as we continue remediation efforts."
- The incident was severe enough that Cloudflare’s own status page experienced issues, with reports of missing CSS styling, signaling a deeper infrastructure problem affecting both the data plane and the control plane.
- External Reference: [Cloudflare Status Page] (Link directly to the Cloudflare Status Page, where users can find real-time incident reports).
Why Does a Cloudflare Outage Affect the Whole Internet?
Cloudflare's role as a gatekeeper for online traffic means any internal failure can cascade into global outages. The company handles content delivery, DDoS protection, and security challenges for hundreds of thousands of websites.
When its systems malfunction, users attempting to access protected sites often encounter generic security messages like "Please unblock challenges.cloudflare.com to proceed." This simply means the security check provided by Cloudflare is failing, blocking the user from reaching the underlying website.
As one cybersecurity expert noted, these large-scale outages—following similar incidents with AWS and Azure—highlight the internet’s increasing reliance on a small number of centralized infrastructure providers. When one slips, the entire world feels the impact at once.
- External Reference: [What is Cloudflare? How a major outage crashed parts of the internet](Insert a relevant news article link, e.g., from a major tech publication, explaining Cloudflare's core function and historical outages).
What You Should Do Now
If you are currently experiencing issues loading major sites like X, or services like PayPal and Uber Eats (which have been sporadically affected by payment failures):
- Be Patient: The issue is external to the site you are visiting. The services are recovering, and persistent refreshing may increase server load.
- Monitor Official Channels: Keep an eye on the official Cloudflare Status page for the latest remediation updates.
- Check Downdetector: Use an alternative network or check Downdetector (now recovered) for real-time spikes in error reports for your specific service.
We will continue to update this article as Cloudflare releases its official post-incident report detailing the root cause and mitigation steps.