Global Cloudflare outage caused errors on thousands of websites

On Tuesday, 18 November 2025, Cloudflare reported a global outage that began at 11:20, causing error messages and access issues across a number of major websites, including X (formerly Twitter), OpenAI services, and several media portals in Cyprus.

A Cloudflare representative confirmed that the outage started at 11:20 due to a “surge of unusual traffic” directed at one of the company’s services, which caused part of the traffic routed through its network to experience errors. Most of the traffic, however, continued to pass normally.

Some website owners reported being unable to access performance management dashboards. The monitoring service Downdetector recorded a simultaneous spike in outage reports for X and OpenAI.

As an emergency measure, Cloudflare temporarily disabled its Warp encryption service in London, leading to connection errors for users in that region. The company announced that services had been restored but warned that users “may continue to observe elevated error rates” during ongoing mitigation efforts.

Cloudflare engineers were conducting scheduled maintenance at data centers in Tahiti, Los Angeles, Atlanta, and Santiago, but the company did not confirm whether this work was related to the incident. The cause of the traffic surge remains under investigation.