A widespread outage at Cloudflare on November 18 significantly disrupted major internet platforms globally, including X (formerly Twitter) and OpenAI’s ChatGPT. The incident, which the company spent several hours investigating and resolving, highlighted the critical role of internet infrastructure providers.
Cloudflare, a provider that offers content delivery network services, DDoS mitigation, and other internet security and performance services, confirmed the widespread disruption. The company initiated its investigation around 11:48 AM GMT. Initial reports indicated issues affecting multiple prominent websites.
The outage extended its reach to various services, notably impacting social media platform X, the film reviewing site Letterboxd, and even the outage tracking website DownDetector, which complicated real-time monitoring of the incident. During the peak of the disruption, its status page itself experienced intermittent downtime, further illustrating the severity of the internal issues.
As its engineers worked to address the problem, the company observed fluctuating patterns of recovery. While some regions, like the UK, saw initial easing of outage reports, the eastern United States experienced a new surge as users began their workday. The provider provided ongoing updates via its official channels, acknowledging the persistence of the issues for application services customers.
By the afternoon, the company announced that it had identified the core problem and was deploying a fix. Recovery efforts gradually gained traction, with platforms such as Twitter/X returning to full operational capacity. However, the outage’s ripple effect later extended to ChatGPT, which also reported issues likely stemming from the provider’s problems. Even as reports of service restoration increased, the company confirmed it continued “working on restoring service for application services customers” and ultimately resolved the widespread technical fault that impacted its network.