On the morning of Tuesday, November 18, a large‑scale outage at Cloudflare, the company that powers DDoS protection and CDN services for thousands of websites, knocked out major sites worldwide. From social media to gaming and streaming, the impact was wide‑ranging.
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What Went Wrong?
Cloudflare’s own spokesperson, Jackie Dutton, said the failure began around 6:20 AM ET when a configuration file used to manage threat traffic “grew beyond the expected size of entries,” triggering a crash in the software that handles traffic for many of its services. The company confirmed there was no evidence of a malicious attack.
Later, Cloudflare’s CTO Dane Knecht added that a latent bug in a bot‑mitigation service “started to crash after a routine configuration change we made,” and that this was also not the result of an attack.
Who Was Affected?
- X (formerly Twitter)
- ChatGPT
- DownDetector
- Indeed, Grindr, Uber, Canva, Spotify, NJ Transit
- League of Legends and Archive of Our Own
- News outlets such as Axios, The Information, and Politico
Visitors to these sites were met with an error message reading “Please unblock challenges.cloudflare.com to proceed.”
How Quickly Was It Fixed?
By 9:42 AM ET, Cloudflare posted an update on its status page stating that a fix had been implemented and the incident was “now resolved.” The company continued to monitor for any lingering errors.
Other Big Outages in the Last Month
Cloudflare’s incident follows a string of cloud service disruptions: an Amazon Web Services crash that took down Fortnite, Alexa, and Snapchat, and an Azure outage that briefly grounded Xbox Live. These events remind us how critical and fragile the internet’s underlying infrastructure can be.
Takeaway
While Cloudflare remains a cornerstone of internet resilience, this outage underscores how a single configuration issue can ripple across the web. Businesses that rely on third‑party CDN and security providers should maintain backup plans and regularly review the health of their dependencies.
Source: https://www.theverge.com/news/822869/cloudflare-is-down-outage-x-twitter-downdetector
