If you’ve found your way here, you’re likely one of the millions experiencing a major internet blackout this 18th November 2025. You’re not alone. A massive, widespread outage at Cloudflare is currently causing a cascade of failures across the internet, taking down everything from social media giants to critical business platforms.
For the last several minutes, users worldwide have been met with error messages like “502 Bad Gateway,” “503 Service Unavailable,” and connection timeouts on a vast range of websites.
What’s Happening? The Cloudflare Cascade
Cloudflare is not just a website; it’s a critical piece of internet infrastructure. It provides content delivery, security, and DNS services for millions of domains. When a core component of Cloudflare’s global network experiences a failure, the impact is immediate and global.
Early reports and status updates confirm that this is a significant incident affecting multiple Cloudflare services. This means that any website relying on Cloudflare for its core functions is potentially unreachable.
Which Major Sites and Services Are Down?
The scale of this outage is immense. Some of the biggest names on the internet are reporting issues or are completely inaccessible, including:
- X.com (formerly Twitter): Users are unable to load timelines, post, or access direct messages.
- Amazon Web Services (AWS): Issues with the AWS management console and services that rely on Cloudflare are being reported, causing a double blow for many online businesses.
- Cloudways: A major managed cloud hosting platform, itself down, which means thousands of websites hosted through their service are also offline.
- Countless other businesses, news outlets, and SaaS platforms are experiencing total or partial downtime.
This list is far from exhaustive, highlighting just how deeply integrated Cloudflare is in the modern web.
The Real-World Impact: Why This Outage Hurts
This isn’t just an inconvenience; it’s a significant economic event.
- E-commerce Grinds to a Halt: Online stores are losing sales by the second as customers cannot access product pages or complete checkouts.
- Business Operations Stall: Companies relying on web-based SaaS tools for communication, CRM, and project management are unable to work.
- Information and News are Blocked: News websites going dark during a critical time limits the flow of vital information.
- User Trust Erodes: Repeated or prolonged outages can damage user confidence in the reliability of online services.
What Can You Do?
- Check Official Sources: The best place for accurate information is the official Cloudflare Status Page. This page provides real-time updates on their investigation and resolution progress.
- Use Downtime Monitoring Sites: Sites like DownDetector.com provide a crowd-sourced view of which services are having problems and where the issues are concentrated.
- Be Patient: For end-users, the only option is to wait for Cloudflare’s engineering teams to identify the root cause and implement a fix. Refreshing the page repeatedly will not help.
Conclusion:
This ongoing Cloudflare outage is a stark reminder of how reliant the digital world has become on a few key infrastructure providers. When one fails, the ripple effects are felt globally, disrupting business, communication, and daily life.
