A significant technical failure at internet infrastructure giant Cloudflare sparked a major outage on Tuesday, 18th November 2025, bringing down a host of popular websites and online services across the UK and beyond.
Widespread Disruption for Major Platforms
The problems began shortly after 11am, with thousands of users immediately reporting issues. High-profile platforms such as X (formerly Twitter), Spotify, and ChatGPT were among the first to be affected. The disruption also extended to the film review community Letterboxd, multiplayer games like League of Legends, and even the official Scottish Parliament website.
Even the outage tracking service, DownDetector, was temporarily crippled by the incident, illustrating the sheer scale of the problem. At the peak of the disruption, more than 10,000 users had reported problems related to Cloudflare on DownDetector alone.
Internal Server Error and Intermittent Recovery
Visitors to the affected websites were met with a message citing an "internal server error on Cloudflare's network". The company, which provides critical network and security services for around a fifth of all global websites, confirmed the issue in a service update.
Cloudflare stated it was "experiencing an internal service degradation" and acknowledged that some services were being "intermittently affected". Some sites, including X, briefly came back online only to experience further technical problems, causing frustration for users.
Ongoing Remediation Efforts
In its latest communication, Cloudflare reported that it was seeing services recover, but warned that customers may continue to observe higher-than-normal error rates as its teams continued with remediation efforts. The company's services, which include bot detection and website protection, are vital for the smooth operation of countless online businesses.
The timing of the outage was notable, as Cloudflare had scheduled maintenance for its SCL (Santiago) data centre for the same Tuesday, though it is unclear if this was directly related to the widespread service degradation.
