AI generated image for representation
Cloudflare , which helps many websites work, faced a major outage today(November 18). This problem lasted for more than 2 hours and affected popular sites such as X (Twitter), ChatGPT, Spotify, Discord, and Canva. The user wrote: “THE CLOUDFLARE COLLAPSE BY NUMBERS: OUTAGE SEVERITY: – Global scope across ALL timezones – 11,000+ reports in USA (first hour) – 3,800+ reports in UK (first hour) – Multiple critical services failed simultaneously ERROR TYPES REPORTED: – HTTP 500 (Internal Server Error) – MOST COMMON – HTTP 502 (Bad Gateway) – HTTP 503 (Service Unavailable) – Turnstile CAPTCHA verification FAILED – Dashboard inaccessible – API completely offline SERVICES DOWN: – X (Twitter) – Posts won’t load – ChatGPT – API blocked globally – PayPal – Transactions failing – Uber Eats – Order system down – League of Legends – Can’t play
The company says the fix is in place and it is checking to make sure everything is back to normal. However, the IT infrastructure company has now fixed the problem that prevented people from using many online services. Many people couldn’t use these services, underscoring how important Cloudflare is to the internet’s functioning. When the internet was down, people turned to social media to discuss how the outage affected them. They were confused and annoyed that they couldn’t get access to several websites. These kinds of problems from major internet companies show how dependent online services are on Cloudflare. Meanwhile, here are a few social media posts that were shared on X during the outage that went viral: A X user named KuroukaRun shared the important numbers of the Cloudflare outage.
- Canva – Can’t design – Downdetector – Can’t even report outages – 1000s of websites showing 500 error pages THE SCARY PART: Internet dependency on Cloudflare : One company Multiple failure points Zero geographic isolation Cascade effect to dependent services This wasn’t a small incident.
The user wrote: “> checks if cloudflare is down > visits downdetector > doesn’t work > they use cloudflare” A third user named Fear Buck shared screenshots of the error message shown by several sites and wrote: “Cloudflare went down early this morning, causing half the internet to go offline. A fifth user shared a meme about the outage and wrote: “X is down Cloudflare is down Engineers rn…” This was a SYSTEMIC FAILURE that exposed how fragile internet infrastructure is. When will we decentralize? cc @Cloudflare #CloudflareDown #InternetOutage” Another user named Parsa shared how the Cloudflare outage took down Downdetector, the website that tracks which websites are down. Major platforms like Twitter/X, ChatGPT (OpenAI), Spotify, Facebook, Telegram, League of Legends, Letterboxd, and others were affected. A fourth user wrote: “When you f**k the whole internet so hard, that even your CSS on your status page don’t work anymore. Cloudflare DOWN !