Large swaths of internet disrupted due to Cloudflare outage

Service restored after several hours; X, ChatGPT, PayPal, dozens of other sites downed; outage intermittently affected The Times of Israel, impeding upload and display of photos

By Reuters and ToI Staff 18 November 2025, 4:46 pmUpdated at 6:58 pm

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FILE - Lava lamps are seen through a lobby window at the headquarters of Cloudflare in San Francisco, August 31, 2022. (AP Photo/Eric Risberg, File)

Major internet platforms, including X and ChatGPT, were inaccessible for thousands of users globally for several hours on Tuesday as web-infrastructure firm Cloudflare was hit by an outage, disrupting internet services.

The outage also intermittently affected The Times of Israel, impeding ToI’s ability to upload and display photos.

The company said the outage that began around 6.30 a.m. ET was caused by an automatically generated configuration file, designed to manage potential security threats.

The file grew too large and crashed the software system handling traffic for several Cloudflare services, the company, whose network handles around a fifth of web traffic, said.

It initially said it deployed a fix but some customers might still be impacted as it recovered service. Cloudflare shares were down 2.3 percent in morning trading.

The incident prevented thousands of users from accessing platforms such as X (formerly Twitter), PayPal, and ChatGPT as users logged reports with Downdetector.

Reports about issues with Cloudflare dropped to about 2,800 by 10:20 a.m. ET from a peak of over 11,000, the outage-tracking tool showed.

Downdetector tracks outages by collating status reports from a number of sources. Since the numbers are based on user-submitted reports, the actual number of affected users may vary.

FILE: The headquarters of Cloudflare is seen in San Francisco, August 31, 2022. (AP Photo/Eric Risberg)

“We saw a spike in unusual traffic to one of Cloudflare’s services beginning at 11:20 UTC. That caused some traffic passing through Cloudflare’s network to experience errors,” the company said in an emailed statement. “We are all hands on deck to make sure all traffic is served without errors.”

X and ChatGPT-creator OpenAI did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

The outage is the latest to hit internet services. Microsoft’s Azure had also faced an issue last month, while disruption at Amazon Web Services caused global turmoil among thousands of websites and some of the most popular apps, such as Snapchat and Reddit, earlier in October.