Hannah CarterIn Brief: Cloudflare’s Global Outage
- On Tuesday, November 18, 2025, a significant Cloudflare outage caused massive disruptions for websites and online services across the globe.
- The incident, which began around 11:30 UTC, impacted a wide range of sectors, from e-commerce and banking to social media and AI platforms.
- Network intelligence firm Cisco ThousandEyes identified the issue as a backend services failure within Cloudflare’s infrastructure, not a network attack.
- The outage left many businesses offline for hours, highlighting the critical dependence of the digital economy on a handful of major cloud providers and raising questions about online infrastructure reliability.
Global Cloudflare Outage Disrupts Businesses Worldwide
A major global outage at Cloudflare on November 18, 2025, sent ripples across the internet, causing widespread disruption to thousands of websites and online services. The incident, confirmed by network intelligence company Cisco ThousandEyes, underscored just how much of the digital world relies on a single provider for performance and security.
The trouble started at approximately 11:30 UTC, affecting businesses across multiple sectors, including e-commerce, banking, and social media. According to the analysis from ThousandEyes, the problem wasn’t with the network paths leading to Cloudflare. Instead, a spike in HTTP 5XX server errors pointed to a failure in its backend services. In simple terms, the front door was open, but nobody was home to serve the requests.
How the Outage Unfolded
Cisco ThousandEyes quickly confirmed the outage was global, paralyzing Cloudflare’s ability to serve content for its customers. This had an immediate knock-on effect. Major platforms like X (formerly Twitter), OpenAI, and Anthropic all experienced service disruptions, leaving users unable to access key features or, in some cases, the services at all.
Cloudflare acknowledged the incident on its status page and said that a fix was being implemented. However, the outage dragged on for several hours, leaving businesses and their customers in the dark.
Impact on E-commerce Businesses
For online retailers, the timing couldn’t have been worse. E-commerce businesses that lean on Cloudflare’s infrastructure saw their website availability plummet, leading directly to lost sales and frustrated customers. As reported by CNET, several large online retailers reported significant downtime, with some losing all traffic during what should have been peak shopping hours.
One e-commerce executive bluntly told CNET, “We lost thousands of dollars in sales within the first hour of the outage. Our customers couldn’t reach our site, and our support lines were flooded with complaints.” This is a stark reminder of how fragile online operations can be, an issue that has plagued other major platforms in the past, such as the 2021 AWS outage.
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Banking and Financial Services Affected
It wasn’t just retailers feeling the pain. Financial institutions using Cloudflare for their secure web services also faced serious disruptions. Some banks reported problems with their online banking portals and mobile apps, locking customers out of their accounts.
The BBC noted that several major banks in Europe and North America experienced temporary outages, affecting customer access to account information and transaction capabilities. “We had to redirect customers to alternative channels, but the outage caused delays and confusion for our users,” a spokesperson for a leading European bank stated. The incident serves as another wake-up call, much like the Optus outage in Australia, about the vulnerability of essential services.
Social Media and Communication Platforms Hit
Social media platforms weren’t immune. X was unable to serve content to many users, which led to widespread complaints and a predictable surge in people flocking to other apps to talk about the outage. Hashtags related to the Cloudflare failure were soon trending globally.
AI powerhouses OpenAI and Anthropic, both reliant on Cloudflare, also reported degraded performance and service interruptions. This showed that even the most cutting-edge tech companies are built on the same foundational infrastructure as everyone else.
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Cloudflare’s Response and Remediation
Throughout the incident, Cloudflare provided updates on its status page, confirming they were actively working to restore services. In the aftermath, the company published a detailed post-mortem, as is standard practice for major incidents. Their official report confirmed that the root cause was an issue with their backend services, not a network problem or a malicious DDoS attack. This transparency is crucial for rebuilding trust after such a widespread failure.
Lessons for Businesses and Cloud Reliability
The November 18th outage is a powerful lesson in the risks of relying on a single cloud provider for critical infrastructure. While Cloudflare is known for its robust performance, this incident proves that no service is infallible. This situation mirrors concerns raised after other major incidents, exposing the dangerous reality of big tech dependence.
Experts suggest that businesses should start seriously considering multi-cloud strategies and developing robust disaster recovery plans to soften the blow of future outages. As cloud services become ever more woven into the fabric of global commerce, the need for resilient and redundant systems has never been more apparent.
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Understanding the financial and operational impact of an outage is critical for any business. The TechBull recommends using business intelligence tools to track key metrics in real-time. With a platform like Databox, you can build dashboards to monitor website availability, track sales performance, and immediately quantify the financial cost of downtime. This data is invaluable for making informed decisions about infrastructure and planning for future resilience.
