New Delhi: Major operations on the internet faltered in a duration of a few hours Tuesday, creating a wave of confusion and panic among digital users. Suddenly, trusted sites such as ChatGPT, X, and Canva refused to load, delivering error messages instead. Behind this disruption was one of the invisible pillars of the web: Cloudflare, the San Francisco-based infrastructure company whose network handles roughly one-fifth of global web traffic.
Cloudflare’s own explanation was almost anticlimactic compared to the chaos it caused. According to the company’s statement, the culprit was not a hacker or a power failure, but a software fault with devastating reach.
A routine configuration change triggered a dormant bug inside the system that powers the company’s bot-management capabilities. This caused a spike in internal traffic and a key configuration file to bloat beyond what the software expected. Once that file crossed its limit, Cloudflare’s traffic-processing software, which routes millions of web requests every second, began to fail repeatedly. These misfires then travelled outward in the form of “500 Internal Server Error” messages that were plastered across the internet.
The cascade began around 6:20 pm IST, and by 8:45 pm IST, the company claimed to have fixed the issue, and services began to recover.
The list of affected platforms read like a cross-section of daily digital life: ChatGPT, X, Spotify, Canva, Riot Games, news websites, e-commerce portals, and countless smaller business sites. Even website downtime tracker Downdetector wasn’t spared. The platform, which aggregates outage reports, struggled under the sudden surge of traffic and its own reliance on networks strained by Cloudflare’s malfunction.
Cloudflare’s Chief Technical Officer (CTO) Dane Knecht later apologised on X for the sudden outage. “I won’t mince words: earlier today we failed our customers and the broader Internet when a problem in @Cloudflare network impacted large amounts of traffic that rely on us. The sites, businesses, and organizations that rely on Cloudflare depend on us being available and I apologize for the impact that we caused,“ he wrote.
I won’t mince words: earlier today we failed our customers and the broader Internet when a problem in @Cloudflare network impacted large amounts of traffic that rely on us. The sites, businesses, and organizations that rely on Cloudflare depend on us being available and I…
— Dane Knecht 🦭 (@dok2001) November 18, 2025
What does Cloudflare do?
Cloudflare sits between users and origin servers, terminating TLS (transport layer security), caching content, routing requests to the appropriate backends, and enforcing security policies, including Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) protection and bot mitigation. When the proxy layer fails, requests never reach their destination cleanly, and sites may display errors even if their own servers are working normally. This architectural role, extremely useful in terms of speed and security, is also what makes any outage so disastrous.
Users saw the familiar “500 Internal Server Error” message, and outage-tracking services saw tens of thousands of reports. Cloudflare’s internal error took down almost half of the internet, because it is the biggest company with a large number of daily-use websites being managed from its data centres.
While the problem was mitigated swiftly within a few hours, it had a significant revenue dent. For Cloudflare itself, the hit was modest but real: its stock slipped briefly as the disruption drew attention to the risk that even large, trusted infrastructure providers carry. The stakes were higher for the websites dependent on Cloudflare. For e-commerce shops, subscription platforms, and streaming services, a pause of even an hour translates into a loss of orders, ad revenue, or user engagement. While no public figure tabulated the exact cost, analysts marked the episode as another red flag around concentration risk in internet infrastructure.
Also read: Cloudflare outage is a sharp warning to India. We’re exposed to foreign digital failures
How often do such outages happen?
The outage won’t fundamentally dent Cloudflare’s growth, but it’s a reputational bruise. Cloudflare has promised improvements, safety checks, and better guardrails to prevent similar runaway bugs.
This isn’t an isolated event. Just last month, Amazon Web Services had a major outage that broke everything from payment gateways to video streaming. Previously, Microsoft Azure experienced its own multi-hour slowdown.
For ordinary users, yesterday’s downtime was mostly a nuisance that disrupted their lives for a few hours. However, the frequency of such incidents serves as a critical reminder of how resilient the internet really is.
While services such as Cloudflare, AWS, and Microsoft Azure are trusted by crores, is it truly ideal that the internet centralises around a few backbone systems? We must remember that when one of these giant cogs stalls, lakhs of others stop spinning with it.
(Edited by Prasanna Bachchhav)