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Cloudflare Outage Disrupts Major Platforms Worldwide

Cloudflare, a widely used internet infrastructure company, resolved an outage that disrupted services for thousands of users globally on Tuesday (18/11). The downtime affected platforms including ChatGPT, “League of Legends,” and the New Jersey Transit system.

By 12:44 p.m. EST, Cloudflare said its engineers no longer detected the issues, though monitoring continued to ensure all services were fully restored.

Key Services Impacted by the Cloudflare Issue

The outage impacted social media platform X, e-commerce site Shopify, Dropbox, Coinbase, and Moody’s credit ratings service. Moody’s website displayed an Error Code 500 and referred users to Cloudflare for information.

New Jersey Transit reported that some digital services, including njtransit.com, were temporarily unavailable or slow. New York City Emergency Management also noted reports of city service disruptions.

Internationally, France’s SNCF website was affected, limiting access to schedules and service updates. The company said teams were working to restore services as quickly as possible.

How Cloudflare’s Infrastructure Supports the Internet

Cloudflare functions as a content delivery network, managing traffic for roughly 20% of the world’s websites. Rather than connecting directly to websites, users connect to the nearest Cloudflare server, which speeds up responses and protects sites from high traffic volumes.

Cybersecurity expert Mike Chapple explained, “When you access a website protected by Cloudflare, your computer doesn’t connect directly to that site… It’s a win-win for everyone, until it fails, and 20% of the internet goes down at the same time.”

Root Cause and Company Response

Cloudflare said the outage resulted from an automatically generated configuration file used to manage threat traffic that “grew beyond an expected size of entries,” causing a software crash.

The company began noticing a spike in unusual traffic around 5:20 a.m. ET. A spokesperson confirmed there was no evidence the outage was caused by an attack or malicious activity.

“Given the importance of Cloudflare’s services, any outage is unacceptable. We apologize to our customers and the internet in general for letting you down today,” the spokesperson said.

Previous Cloud Service Failures

This outage comes less than a month after Amazon Web Services experienced a major disruption, followed by a global Microsoft Azure outage affecting Office 365 and other services. In July 2024, a faulty software upgrade by CrowdStrike caused a widespread outage impacting flights, financial services, and hospitals.

Shares of Cloudflare fell more than 2% following the incident.

PHOTO: GETTY IMAGES

This article was created with AI assistance and is a summary of two original articles, which can be read in full at the following links:

https://apnews.com/article/cloudflare-outage-x-openai-9335e8e0da2a0027d1fbac5eb97d11ae

https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2025/11/18/cloudflare-down-outage-traffic-spike-x-chatgpt.html