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           Cloudflare Outage Takes Down Large Swaths of the Internet

   Adam Engst

   At 6:48 AM on 18 November 2025, [1]Cloudflare posted:

     Cloudflare is experiencing an internal service degradation. Some
     services may be intermittently impacted. We are focused on restoring
     service. We will update as we are able to remediate. More updates to
     follow shortly.

   What's not obvious from that dry language is that large parts of the
   Internet went down as a result, including TidBITS, as Jetpack'a
   WordPress plug-in that monitors uptime'informed me shortly after. The
   Cloudflare error page was remarkably helpful, clearly indicating that
   the problem was in Cloudflare's network and therefore not something I
   needed to worry about. That was a big relief for me, since otherwise I
   would have had to spend potentially hours trying to identify and fix
   the issue. Cloudflare said it had resolved all the problems 6 hours
   later.

   For those who aren't aware,[2]Cloudflareis an Internet infrastructure
   company that acts as an intermediary between Internet users and about
   24 million websites, roughly 15'20% of all websites by some estimates.
   Cloudflare's main role is as a content delivery network that caches Web
   pages in its data centers around the world, making sites load faster
   for users than if the original servers had to deliver every requested
   page. The company also protects websites from distributed
   denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, provides firewalls to block malicious
   traffic, helps manage bot traffic, and more. Since basic Cloudflare
   services are free, it's extremely popular. (We now pay $5 per month for
   Automatic Platform Optimization to improve Cloudflare's caching with
   WordPress.) In the last 30 days, Cloudflare served 1.61 TB of data for
   [3]tidbits.com, so our server had to deliver only 40 GB'Cloudflare
   handles nearly 98% of our traffic.

   As with the recent[4]Amazon AWS outagein October 2025, this Cloudflare
   outage underscores that one of the original promises of the Internet's
   packet-switching architecture'that it can route around damage'is
   effectively no longer true. It's just too compelling for organizations
   to rely on companies like Amazon and Cloudflare to manage all the
   hardware, networks, and configurations required to serve terabytes of
   traffic while defending against nonstop attacks.

References

   Visible links
   1. https://www.cloudflarestatus.com/incidents/8gmgl950y3h7
   2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloudflare
   3. https://tidbits.com/
   4. https://www.theverge.com/news/802486/aws-outage-alexa-fortnite-snapchat-offline

   Hidden links:
   5. https://tidbits.com/uploads/2025/11/Cloudflare-down-scaled.jpg
   6. https://tidbits.com/uploads/2025/11/Cloudflare-TidBITS-traffic-scaled.png

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