Featured Image Credit: Yuichiro Chino / Getty
What did we do before the internet? Imagine sitting around a campfire and telling ghost stories while toasting marshmallows instead of watching The Haunting of Hill House on Netflix and Googling how to toast marshmallows.
On November 18, 2025, it feels like we've been sent hurtling back to Medieval times, as a massive outage has knocked out swathes of the internet.
Showing how reliant we are on certain services, 2025 recently saw an October issue with Amazon Web Services take out the likes of Zoom, WhatsApp, and Roblox, alongside a slew of banking apps.
Although Elon Musk gloated that Jeff Bezos has been hit hard, the world's richest man might be laughing on the other side of his face.
Advert
While X escaped the last round of downings, it went under in one of the biggest outages in living memory.
Cloudflare is a name you might've seen but never really thought about. The US company defends millions of websites against malicious attacks, but now, it's blocked users from accessing some of the biggest sites around.
Downdetector reported a spike in issues with everything from X to ChatGPT, with it unclear what brought the internet to its knees. Cloudflare remains confident that it's got to the root of the problem, stating: "A fix has been implemented and we believe the incident is now resolved. We are continuing to monitor for errors to ensure all services are back to normal."
A spokesperson for the company reiterated: "We saw a spike in unusual traffic to one of Cloudflare’s services beginning at 11.20 am.
“That caused some traffic passing through Cloudflare’s network to experience errors. While most traffic for most services continued to flow as normal, there were elevated errors across multiple Cloudflare services.
“We do not yet know the cause of the spike in unusual traffic. We are all hands on deck to make sure all traffic is served without errors. After that, we will turn our attention to investigating the cause of the unusual spike in traffic.”
Engineers had pencilled in maintenance at datacentres in Tahiti, Los Angeles, Atlanta, and Santiago, although it's unclear whether this is what led to the outage.
If you want to know what sites were affected/might still be facing problems, the exhaustive list shows just how devastating a Cloudflare outage can be. The downed sites include:
Others, including Quora, Discord, Grindr, League of Legends, and Google Gemini, all reported issues earlier in the day.
Referring to Cloudflare as "the biggest company you’ve never heard of," the Surrey Centre for Cyber Security's Professor Alan Woodward explained how it provides services to “protect your websites, apps, APIs, and AI workloads while accelerating performance."
Cloudflare typically hosts websites, but given that it helps them load efficiently while fighting off cyberattacks, it's a cause for concern that it can be affected in such a way. While the World Wide Web appears to be back to normal, we'll await an official response on what exactly went wrong.
