Hannah CarterIn Brief: The Cloudflare Outage
- Yesterday, The Techbull and thousands of other major websites went offline unexpectedly.
- The culprit was a massive global outage at Cloudflare, a service we use for security and performance.
- Cloudflare confirmed the issue was caused by an internal database update, not a cyberattack.
- Service was restored within a few hours, but the event highlights the web’s reliance on a few key infrastructure companies.
What Really Happened to The Techbull Yesterday
If you tried to visit us yesterday, you were likely met with an error message. You weren’t alone. On November 18, 2025, a significant chunk of the internet simply vanished for a few hours. The reason? A massive global outage at Cloudflare, an internet infrastructure giant that countless websites, including ours, rely on for security and performance.
It all happened in a flash. One minute things were fine, the next, sites were down across the globe. Cloudflare’s CEO, Matthew Prince, was quick to communicate what was happening. In a statement on the company’s blog, he confirmed, “On November 18, 2025, Cloudflare experienced a significant global outage, impacting thousands of customers across sectors.” He later clarified the root cause, stating, “Our outage was triggered by a misconfigured database update that broke our Bot Management system, causing large-scale failures.”
How Cloudflare’s Trouble Rippled Across the Internet
When Cloudflare has a bad day, the whole internet feels it. The outage wasn’t just a headache for small publishers like us. Some of the biggest names online were hit hard. According to a report by Amanda Silberling at TechCrunch, “Sites including X (formerly Twitter), ChatGPT, and others were among those hit by outages as a result of Cloudflare’s network failures.”
This event was a stark reminder of how interconnected, and fragile, the modern web can be. As a staff report from Techi noted, “The disruptions reaffirmed just how dependent even the world’s biggest internet services are on a small number of infrastructure providers.” It exposed the dangerous reality of big tech dependence, a single point of failure that can bring huge digital economies to a standstill.
Digging Into the Cloudflare Outage
So what actually went wrong behind the scenes? At first, the scale of the outage made many suspect a massive DDoS attack, similar to the ones that have plagued countries like Kenya recently. However, TechCrunch later confirmed, “Cloudflare at first suspected a DDoS attack but later confirmed the root cause was internal, not external malicious activity.”
Matthew Prince provided a more detailed breakdown. “A permissions change for a database allowed multiple invalid entries, which in turn caused a critical file to become corrupt,” he explained. “This file triggered errors in our Bot Management module, impacting services globally for several hours.” In simple terms, a small internal error had a massive, cascading effect across their entire network.
Why The Techbull Was Affected and So Many Others Were Too
To our readers, we want to be transparent. The Techbull, like tens of thousands of other sites, relies on Cloudflare for our security and speed. We use their services to protect us from malicious traffic and to ensure our pages load quickly for you, no matter where you are. Because we were routed through their network, we were among those who displayed error messages and were temporarily inaccessible during the outage window.
The impact was felt across various sectors. A service bulletin from Boston University highlighted the widespread disruption, stating, “A major internet outage by Cloudflare impacted multiple services, including Blackboard, library resources, and other third-party services.” From education to e-commerce, the domino effect was clear.
How Cloudflare Fixed the Issue and Our Next Steps
The good news is that Cloudflare’s team acted fast. Once the problem was identified, their engineers got to work. “Engineers at Cloudflare began rolling back changes and restored most core traffic by 14:30 UTC,” Prince reported. “By 17:06 UTC, all systems were reported as fully functional.”
In the aftermath, Cloudflare has committed to preventing a repeat performance. Amanda Silberling of TechCrunch noted, “Cloudflare pledged to conduct a detailed post-mortem and assess new protections to avoid future outages of this scale.” This is a crucial step, as trust in these core internet services is paramount.
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Keeping The Techbull Resilient in a Cloud-Dependent World
Yesterday’s events have sparked important conversations here at The Techbull. As the Techi staff wrote, “Questions about redundancy, risk planning, and decentralization have never been more pressing for critical internet services.” This couldn’t be more true. We are actively reviewing our own infrastructure to see how we can build more resilience.
This includes exploring better ways to monitor our dependencies in real-time. As TechCrunch pointed out, “Resilience planning for modern sites is critical, given the centralization of key parts of web infrastructure.” To that end, we’re looking at platforms that can give us a clearer, more immediate picture of our site’s performance and its reliance on third-party services.
Recommended Tech
Here at The Techbull, we believe in using the right tools for the job. For businesses wanting to get a deeper, real-time understanding of their website’s performance and dependencies, a platform like Databox is invaluable. It helps you pull all your data into one place so you can spot trends and potential issues before they become problems.
This incident also underscores the broader theme of online security. While this outage wasn’t a malicious attack, it serves as a reminder of how vulnerable our digital lives can be. Just as we are working to secure our website’s infrastructure, it’s a good idea for everyone to think about their personal digital security. Protecting your identity and personal data from the many threats out there is more important than ever.
Recommended Tech
As we work to make our site more resilient, we encourage our readers to do the same for their personal digital lives. The Techbull recommends a comprehensive service like Aura to protect yourself and your family from online threats like identity theft, financial fraud, and malware. It’s an all-in-one solution that helps keep you safe in an increasingly complex digital world.
