When automation turned against the world wide web

A routine Cloudflare update triggered a global outage, exposing the security and stability risks of centralised cloud and why resilience must be re-engineered.

- BY DAVID SEHYEON BAEK

The Cloudflare outage of 18 November 2025 revealed just how dependent the digital world has become on a few powerful infrastructure providers.

What began as an ordinary software update quickly spread into one of the most disruptive incidents in recent years. For hours, websites and applications worldwide were unreachable, displaying only blank screens or 500-series server errors.

Platforms like X (Twitter), OpenAl's ChatGPT, Canva, and Uber all went down, along with countless smaller services that depend on Cloudflare's network. Analysts later estimated that nearly a quarter of all websites worldwide were affected, an event that exposed the hidden fragility of the internet's underlying structure.

Cloudflare’s role in the modern web cannot be overstated. It serves as the invisible backbone for millions of websites, providing content delivery, DNS resolution, DDoS protection, and web application firewalls. Nearly all traffic to Cloudflare-protected sites is routed through its edge servers before reaching the original application servers. This model improves speed and security but also creates a single point of dependency. When these internal systems failed, that dependency turned from strength to weakness, collapsing much of the internet's traffic in real time.

Even services designed to report outages became victims of the same outage. Downdetector, which tracks service failures, was itself knocked offline because it relied on Cloudflare’s infrastructure. The company's own status page was also unavailable, further deepening confusion and speculation.

Some assumed the company was under attack, while others thought it was a global DNS failure. In reality, the cause was entirely internal—a small but disastrous software error that multiplied through Cloudflare’s automated systems faster than anyone could stop it.

WHAT TRIGGERED THE CLOUDFLARE OUTAGE