According to PCWorld, a major Cloudflare outage on November 18, 2025 has disrupted hundreds of websites and online services including X (formerly Twitter), ChatGPT, PayPal, Uber, League of Legends, and Valorant. The content delivery network first reported an “internal service degradation” at 6:48 AM EST, warning that some services might be intermittently impacted. By 8:13 AM EST, Cloudflare announced partial recovery of Cloudflare Access and WARP services with error levels returning to pre-incident rates. The company re-enabled WARP access in London specifically while continuing to work on restoring other affected services. As of 9:22 AM EST, Cloudflare was still working on a complete fix with many sites remaining unavailable.
Critical Infrastructure Fragility
Here’s the thing: we’re seeing this pattern way too often. Last month it was Amazon’s cloud services taking down everything from web services to Ring doorbells to those terrifying smart beds that apparently cook their owners. Now it’s Cloudflare’s turn. And honestly, it’s getting ridiculous how much of the internet depends on just a handful of companies. Cloudflare operates hundreds of data centers and serves as a content delivery network for millions of websites. When they sneeze, half the internet catches a cold. Basically, we’ve built this incredibly fragile system where single points of failure can take down everything from payment processors to social media to ride-sharing apps simultaneously.
The Single Point Failure Problem
So what happens when the plumbing of the internet breaks? Everything stops working. PayPal can’t process payments. Uber can’t connect riders with drivers. ChatGPT can’t generate responses. X can’t show tweets. And these aren’t just minor inconveniences – businesses lose money, people can’t get where they need to go, and critical communication channels go dark. The fact that so many major services rely on the same underlying infrastructure should worry everyone. I mean, shouldn’t there be more redundancy built into these systems by now? We’ve had enough of these massive outages to know better.
Partial Workarounds and Recovery
Interestingly, PCWorld noted that while website access was broken, some apps continued working. The ChatGPT and X apps were reportedly accessible even when their websites were down. That suggests there might be different routing or failover mechanisms for mobile applications versus web interfaces. But let’s be real – that’s a temporary band-aid, not a solution. Cloudflare did manage to restore some services like Access and WARP by around 8:13 AM EST, and they specifically mentioned London recovery. Still, the fact that they were still “working on a fix” hours later at 9:22 AM EST shows how complex these infrastructure problems can be to resolve.
What’s Really Going On?
Now, the source speculates this might be related to maintenance work at a data center. But we’ve heard that story before. The truth is, we probably won’t get the full technical post-mortem for days or weeks, if ever. These companies tend to be pretty tight-lipped about what actually goes wrong. Was it a configuration error? A hardware failure? A security incident? Who knows. What we do know is that these outages keep happening, and they keep affecting more and more critical services. At what point do we start demanding better resilience from these infrastructure providers? Because right now, it feels like we’re all just crossing our fingers and hoping the next outage doesn’t happen during something truly critical.
