Cloudflare Outage Was NOT a Cyber Attack

Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince has clarified that its recent global outage was caused by an internal configuration error and a latent software flaw rather than any form of cyber attack.

A Major Disruption Across Large Parts Of The Internet

The outage of internet infrastructure company Cloudflare began at around 11:20 UTC on 18 November 2025 and lasted until shortly after 17:00, disrupting access to many of the world’s most visited platforms. For example, services including X, ChatGPT, Spotify, Shopify, Etsy, Bet365, Canva and multiple gaming platforms experienced periods of failure as Cloudflare’s edge network returned widespread 5xx errors. Cloudflare itself described the disruption as its most serious since 2019, with a significant portion of its global traffic unable to route correctly for several hours.