Issues with web infrastructure company Cloudflare triggered a massive outage for services such as X, ChatGPT, Canva and thousands of other sites on Tuesday, November 18.
The outage, sparking at around 5:18 pm, was largely resolved at 8:12 pm IST. “A fix has been implemented, and we believe the incident is now resolved. We are continuing to monitor for errors to ensure all services are back to normal,” stated the Cloudflare dashboard.
The Cloudflare team is continuing to focus on restoring service post-fix and is mitigating several issues that remain post-deployment.
What is Cloudflare and why does one company breaking affect so much of the internet?
Cloudflare is an American company that works like a giant shield and turbo-booster for the internet. It sits between you and the actual website servers, delivering pages faster (through its Content Delivery Network or CDN), blocking hackers, stopping DDoS attacks, and protecting against bots. Because it offers a very generous free plan, millions of websites – from small blogs to massive platforms – use it.
As of 2025, Cloudflare holds approximately 28% of the global CDN market, making it the largest or second-largest CDN provider depending on the metric used (some reports still put Akamai slightly ahead in revenue, but Cloudflare leads in number of domains protected).
Amazon Web Services (AWS), which also runs the CloudFront CDN and is the world’s biggest cloud computing provider with roughly 29–30% of the global cloud infrastructure market in 2025, suffered a similar outage last month that took down Alexa, Snapchat, ChatGPT, and many other services.
Cloudflare Outage
According to news agency Reuters, more than 5,600 reports of issues with X were recorded on Downdetector as of 6:51 a.m. ET (5:21 pm IST).
At 4:47 pm IST, Cloudflare’s status dashboard said that they are facing issues with their support portal provider “Our support portal provider is currently experiencing issues, and as such, customers might encounter errors viewing or responding to support cases…We are working alongside our 3rd party provider to understand the full impact and mitigate this problem.” they stated.
At 5:18 pm IST, they acknowledged the global network outage stating “Cloudflare is experiencing an internal service degradation. Some services may be intermittently impacted. We are focused on restoring service. We will update as we are able to remediate. More updates to follow shortly.”
At 5:51 pm, they informed that they are seeing services recover; however customers may continue to observe higher-than-normal error rates as remediation efforts continue.
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