Cloudflare down latest: Websites such as X not working amid technical problems with the internet
Parts of the web experienced outages on 18 November 2025 after a technical problem at Cloudflare caused widespread 500 internal server errors. Popular services such as X (formerly Twitter) and Letterboxd showed Cloudflare error pages to visitors. Cloudflare has acknowledged the incident and is investigating.
What happened
Cloudflare — a major internet infrastructure provider that offers CDN, DNS, security and performance tools — reported an issue impacting multiple customers. Users attempting to load affected sites often saw a message about an "internal server error on Cloudflare’s network" asking them to try again later.
Official response
“Cloudflare is aware of, and investigating an issue which potentially impacts multiple customers,” the company said. In a follow-up update the company added the problem was causing "widespread 500 errors" and that their Dashboard and API were also affected.
Timeline & live updates
~11:30am UK time — Issues begin to appear; some sites intermittently fail to load.
~11:45am — Cloudflare posts an initial acknowledgement and begins investigating.
~12:08pm — Further updates say the company is working to understand impact and mitigate the problem.
~12:19pm — Some sites (for example X) begin loading again for some users, suggesting partial recovery for parts of the network.
Wider impact
The outage affected a diverse set of websites and services because many rely on Cloudflare to deliver traffic, handle DNS, and protect against attacks. Even DownDetector — the outage-tracking site used by many readers — experienced problems showing a sharp spike in reported issues once its pages loaded.
Comparison with previous outages
The incident echoes a major Amazon Web Services (AWS) outage roughly a month earlier, when issues at a single cloud provider similarly caused large portions of the internet to go offline or degrade. Both events highlight how centralised internet infrastructure points can create cascading failures when they malfunction.
What users saw
Affected users commonly encountered Cloudflare's 500 error pages. The message typically asked users to retry after a few minutes. For some users and sites, services returned quickly; for others, the disruption lasted longer.
What Cloudflare says next
Cloudflare has been posting short updates to its status channels indicating it is investigating and attempting mitigation. As of the latest update referenced in this article, Cloudflare had not yet declared the incident fully resolved and continued to collect diagnostic information.
Practical advice for affected users
- Refresh the page after a short wait — some services may restore quickly.
- Check the official Cloudflare status page and the affected site’s social accounts for updates.
- If you run a website relying on Cloudflare, monitor your Cloudflare dashboard and logs for details.
- Consider standby plans (alternate providers, multi-CDN, or failover DNS) if you operate critical services.
Live coverage by Andrew Griffin. First published 18 November 2025 12:08 GMT — latest update 12:19 GMT.
Source: live reporting & Cloudflare status updates.
