Good morning. The X and ChatGPT apps were taken down worldwide on Tuesday due to a Cloudflare outage, after a software bug disrupted traffic to thousands of sites, as reported by the company; no evidence of an attack. Core Web Services: The outage started shortly before 11:20 UTC and services did not fully recover until around 14:30, Nov. 18, 2025.
Cloudflare explained that the outage was due to a configuration file that grew beyond its normal size and overwhelmed traffic-management software, according to a root-cause analysis TechRadar reported. There was also no sign of a cyberattack, a spokesman added, according to Bloomberg.
That disruption spread through services that relied on those platforms, such as X and ChatGPT, briefly hampering large parts of the public internet. Reuters said that at the peak of the issue, several thousand users complained, and added that Cloudflare handles about one-fifth of global web traffic.
OpenAI informed developers that it had been experiencing sporadic access issues across ChatGPT and its APIs, caused by Cloudflare. Service began to improve as Cloudflare released fixes.
By early afternoon in London, Cloudflare said it had rolled out a fix and that teams were monitoring for lingering problems, according to a message on its status feed, as reported by The Independent.
The incident brings to mind other self-inflicted stumbles: a 9 WAF rule error in 2019 that spiked CPU usage and a 2 network configuration mistake that knocked traffic across key datacenters. Those episodes, as is apparently the case today, were chalked up to outside attacks without proof.
Cloudflare has pledged to share a full postmortem, implement safeguards to prevent the mistake from recurring, and monitor the system for any lingering errors, Business Insider reported.
The episode highlights the internet’s reliance on a few key companies. When a Cloudflare outage ripples, even competitive services can fail in lockstep — demonstrating that resilience, rollback discipline, and fine-grained configuration limits do matter.
