Major Internet Outage Strikes: Cloudflare Services Down, Impacting X, ChatGPT, and More

November 18 2025 - A significant operational failure is currently gripping Cloudflare, one of the Internet's foundational infrastructure giants, leading to widespread access issues for a broad spectrum of major online services. Among the high-profile casualties of this disruption are X (the platform formerly known as Twitter) operated by Elon Musk, the popular conversational AI service ChatGPT, and the ubiquitous graphic design tool Canva among other websites. As of this report, the company has offered minimal explanation, stating only that it is actively investigating the root cause of the system compromise.

Cloudflare’s vital role in the global network ecosystem cannot be overstated. It operates as a sophisticated Content Delivery Network (CDN) and a paramount security shield, efficiently situating itself as the intermediary layer between the user’s web browser and the site’s ultimate hosting server.

Under normal circumstances, a request initiated by a user typing a URL is first channeled to Cloudflare’s geographically optimized network. This system then intelligently and rapidly routes the request to the correct server that hosts the website. This seamless, instantaneous function is what is currently disabled.

The core technical issue appears to be a systemic failure within this critical routing system. For platforms like X, which serve an estimated 600 million monthly active users, this breakdown translates into a complete inability to load feeds, post new content, or scroll through existing interactions effectively freezing the platform.

On its status page, the corporation confirmed the ongoing trouble, cautioning that the scope of the problem is substantial: “Cloudflare is aware of, and investigating an issue which potentially impacts multiple customers.”