Cloudflare Outage Disrupts X, Hostinger, ChatGPT, Spotify and Several Global Platforms

A massive outage at internet infrastructure provider Cloudflare on Tuesday, November 18, 2025, resulted in widespread service disruption across major platforms, including X (formerly Twitter), Hostinger, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Spotify, and several others. Users worldwide were greeted with blank screens and repeated 500 Error messages, underscoring how dependent the modern internet is on a small number of backbone service providers. Cloudflare, which manages critical security and content delivery functions for millions of websites, acts as the intermediary layer that accelerates content delivery and protects sites from attacks.

A technical issue in this central layer caused a cascading ripple effect, temporarily knocking numerous unrelated services offline. Cloudflare Issues Official Statement The company quickly acknowledged the outage, confirming that its internal systemsincluding the Cloudflare Dashboard and API were also affected.

Cloudflare is aware of and investigating an issue impacting multiple customers. Widespread 500 errors observed. Dashboard and API failures reported. We are working to determine the full impact and mitigate the issue. Further updates will follow. The 500 errors pointed to server-side failures originating inside Cloudflares network itself, rather than from the individual platforms relying on it.

Security Experts Raise Concerns Cybersecurity firm TraceX Labs classified the incident as a major security event, noting that outages of this scale can severely affect multinational companies that heavily depend on Cloudflare for security and uptime. Restoration Efforts Underway As of 12:37 UTC on Nov 18, 2025, Cloudflares system status tracker showed signs of gradual recovery. However, the company cautioned that users might still face higher-than-normal error rates until the network fully stabilizes. For live updates, users can monitor Cloudflares official status portal.

Services Affected by the Outage The disruption hit a broad spectrum of global platforms. Major services reported as affected include: Social Media & Search X (formerly Twitter) Gemini AI & Tech Platforms ChatGPT Perplexity OpenAI services Payments & Business Tools PayPal Sage Cloud & Productivity Amazon Web Services (AWS) Canva Entertainment Spotify Letterboxd Users experienced issues accessing X timelines, while OpenAI confirmed intermittent failures across ChatGPT services.

Even the outage-tracking platform Downdetector saw a surge in error reports and experienced interruptions of its own. A Pattern of Increasingly Frequent Outages This event is part of a growing trend of widespread internet disruptions. Earlier outages at Microsoft Azure and AWS in October, and a significant Google Cloud outage in June, similarly affected scores of global services. Experts warn that with so much of the web reliant on a few infrastructure giants, such incidents will continue to have far-reaching consequences.