How The Entire Internet Disappeared Overnight
In Brief
A configuration error at Cloudflare on November 18 caused a cascading outage that temporarily disrupted major services like X, ChatGPT, Spotify, and Uber worldwide.
Imagine this: you wake up, grab your phone, and tap the usual icons. X won’t load. ChatGPT doesn’t answer your question. YouTube doesn’t show your video. Even Downdetector, the site you normally use to check if things are broken, is… broken.
For a few hours on November 18, that was reality for millions of people around the world. A major outage at Cloudflare, one of the key infrastructure companies behind the modern internet, took down or degraded a wide range of services, including X, ChatGPT, Spotify, Uber, Canva, League of Legends and more.
It felt like “the whole internet” had disappeared. In practice, it was something both smaller and scarier: a single failure in one company’s systems cascading across a huge share of the web.
What Actually Went Wrong at Cloudflare
The trouble started early Tuesday morning (Nov. 18) U.S. time. Around 6:20 a.m. ET, Cloudflare saw a spike in unusual traffic passing through one of its systems. Just minutes later, websites that rely on Cloudflare began throwing “internal server error” pages and timing out for users across the globe.
As outage reports piled up on Downdetector and social media, Cloudflare posted that it was “aware of, and investigating” a problem affecting multiple customers. Engineers eventually identified the culprit and pushed a fix, with traffic gradually returning to normal roughly three hours after the disruption began.
The company stressed one key point: there was no sign of a cyberattack. This wasn’t a DDoS, a ransomware incident, or a state actor. It was an internal technical failure. For users, though, the cause didn’t matter. Their experience was simple: the internet stopped working.
What Cloudflare Does (and Why You’ve Never Heard of It)
Most people never visit cloudflare.com on purpose, but they touch its network every day. Cloudflare sits in the middle of the internet “path” between you and the websites you use. In simple terms, Cloudflare:
- Speeds up sites by caching content and routing traffic efficiently (a content deliverynetwork, or CDN);
- Protects them from DDoS attacks and malicious bots;
- Screens traffic to decide what looks safe and what doesn’t.
The company says it handles traffic for roughly a fifth of all websites worldwide. It also processes a massive share of HTTP requests every second, quietly acting as the bouncer and traffic cop for huge parts of the web.
That scale is great when everything is working. When it isn’t, the entire internet can suddenly feel fragile.
The Tiny File That Caused the Crash
Cloudflare’s postmortem tells a surprisingly mundane story. A configuration file (basically a set of rules) used by its bot and threat-management system was being generated automatically. Over time, that file grew larger than engineers expected.
At some point, it crossed a hard limit in the software responsible for handling traffic for several Cloudflare services. Because of a latent bug in that code, the system didn’t fail gracefully. Instead, the oversized file triggered a crash in a core traffic-handling component.
From there, things escalated:
- The bot-management feature tried to apply the new, too-large configuration;
- The process crashed repeatedly instead of rejecting the file;
- That crash cascaded across multiple services that depended on the same software;
- As more nodes failed, a large chunk of Cloudflare’s network started returning errors instead of web pages.
Cloudflare’s CTO, Dane Knecht, called the outage “unacceptable” and said the company had “failed” its customers and the broader internet, promising changes so a single configuration bug can’t cause the same kind of chain reaction again.
Are Outages Getting Worse, or Just Louder?
If it feels like these incidents are happening more often, you’re not the only one. This Cloudflare outage landed only weeks after a major Amazon Web Services incident took down thousands of websites and apps, from Snapchat and Reddit to internal tools businesses rely on every day.
Network monitoring firms have been tracking large-scale disruptions across the internet for years. Their data suggests something subtle:
- The number of big outages each year is not exploding;
- But the impact of each outage is growing, because more services depend on the same central providers.
Twenty years ago, if your employer’s email server went down, it ruined your day, but only for your company. Today, when Cloudflare or AWS has a bad morning, millions of people and businesses feel it at once.
On top of that, people now broadcast every glitch on X, Reddit and TikTok. Incidents that might once have passed quietly as “maintenance issues” now look and feel like global crises.
Fewer Providers, Bigger Risks
The Cloudflare outage fits into a repeated pattern we’ve seen with AWS, Azure and other major infrastructure players:
- A small internal change (a configuration tweak, a software update, a misbehaving script) interacts with some hidden assumption in the system;
- Error handling doesn’t catch it early enough;
- Automated systems amplify the problem instead of containing it;
- The incident spreads across a large number of customers who all depend on the same platform.
We’ve optimized the internet for speed, cost and global scale. The easiest way to get those is to use a handful of massive providers with data centers everywhere and world-class engineering teams.
The trade-off is concentration. When a local ISP has an issue, a town goes offline. When Cloudflare slips, it looks like the whole internet just vanished.
What Tech Leaders Are Saying About the Crash
While Elon Musk didn’t comment directly on the Cloudflare bug, he has repeatedly warned about over-centralized digital infrastructure, especially in relation to X’s own resilience and its shift toward more self-hosted systems. In 2023-2025 he often pointed out that relying on one provider to run large parts of the internet is “a single point of failure problem,” a criticism he has applied to AWS, Apple, Google, Cloudflare-style layers, and even mobile carriers.
Cloudflare’s own CTO delivered the strongest and clearest reaction to the outage. Knecht publicly apologized and said the incident was “unacceptable” because of how many organizations and users rely on Cloudflare’s infrastructure. He also emphasized that the cause was not an attack, but a configuration bug that triggered a cascading failure, something he described as a top priority to prevent in the future.
Jeff Barr, the Chief Evangelist of Amazon Web Services, didn’t address the Cloudflare outage, but he frequently discusses AWS outages and the general pattern behind global-scale failures. His long-standing message: the more interconnected the system, and the more automated the processes, the greater the risk of cascading errors.
And at last, the CEO of Cloudflare, Matthew Prince, spoke out. He has spoken for years about the internet’s delicate architecture, especially the parts no one notices until they break. He often argues that the web’s core health depends on resilience, not perfection.
He has repeated themes like:
- The biggest threats are internal misconfigurations, not attackers;
- Redundancy must be baked into every layer;
- The internet is held together by “a shocking amount of duct tape”.
He did not issue a long public statement during the early aftermath of this outage, but the themes in his past interviews apply directly.
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About The Author
Alisa, a dedicated journalist at the MPost, specializes in cryptocurrency, zero-knowledge proofs, investments, and the expansive realm of Web3. With a keen eye for emerging trends and technologies, she delivers comprehensive coverage to inform and engage readers in the ever-evolving landscape of digital finance.
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Alisa, a dedicated journalist at the MPost, specializes in cryptocurrency, zero-knowledge proofs, investments, and the expansive realm of Web3. With a keen eye for emerging trends and technologies, she delivers comprehensive coverage to inform and engage readers in the ever-evolving landscape of digital finance.
