- By Alex David
- Tue, 18 Nov 2025 10:35 PM (IST)
- Source:JND
For a few nerve-racking hours on Tuesday, the internet felt very unsteady and is still not fully recovered. Some of the world’s most popular platforms — including Gemini, ChatGPT, Uber, Canva, X, Spotify and Perplexity as well as major gaming services — took a bath in errors or got fully kicked off the internet. The cause of the chaos wasn’t a cyberattack, however — it was an overwhelming Cloudflare outage set off by an obscure software bug. Cloudflare serves as a sort of protective shield for hundreds of thousands of websites, sitting in the middle of the computers that connect those sites to the wider internet. When that network stumbles, the fallout radiates across the digital cosmos. By the evening, the company admitted that it had experienced a “failure,” identified why and said services were restored.
What Went Wrong
Cloudflare’s first public update acknowledged that customers worldwide were facing widespread 500 errors. Everything from website dashboards to APIs and login sessions were failing simultaneously. At peak disruption, even Cloudflare’s own monitoring tools struggled to stay online.
Hours later, CTO Dane Knecht stepped in with a more detailed explanation. The outage stemmed from a latent bug that crashed a key system after a routine configuration change. He stressed that it was not an attack or security breach — simply a part of the software failing in an unexpected way.
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The Platforms That Went Down
The exact number of impacted services is still unclear, but major global platforms suffered visible disruptions. OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini, Perplexity AI, Uber, Canva, Spotify, League of Legends, Valorant, X and Truth Social all showed partial or full outages.
Users on X reported timelines failing to load, broken notifications and intermittent access. Some regained access briefly, only to be hit by more glitches shortly after.
UK Services Temporarily Disabled
During the troubleshooting process, Cloudflare briefly disabled certain services for UK users, including WARP and Access. These were re-enabled once error rates stabilised. The company said performance in London had returned to pre-incident levels.
Financial Hit and Recovery
As the outage stretched on, Cloudflare’s stock dipped by 2.3 percent in morning trading, according to Bloomberg. The company later reiterated there was “no evidence” of malicious activity behind the issue.
By late evening, users began reporting that services like ChatGPT, X and Spotify were operating normally again. The CTO confirmed the fix with a short reply: “It is resolved.”
Basic Troubleshooting For “challenges.cloudflare.com” Blocked issue
You can simply follow the steps below:
1. Disable Browser Extensions. Some extensions might interfere with Cloudflare's security checks.
2. Switch Networks. If the issue is network-related, changing your connection may help.
3. Use a Different Browser.
4. Check for Malware.
5. Adjust VPN or Network Settings.
6. Update Browser and Security Tools.
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Current Status
Credits: cloudflarestatus.com [Screenshot by Author]
At the time of writing this article, several services are back online but still as per the Cloudflarestatus.com, they are able to see some errors and latency issues. The status page says that they are working on it globally and clearing the remaining errors and latency issues.
Final Thoughts
The outage was a stark reminder of just how many major platforms rely on Cloudflare’s infrastructure to keep running. A single bug in its systems had managed to throw everything from AI tools to ride-hailing apps and streaming services into a temporary state of disarray. Although Cloudflare has promised protections to prevent a recurrence, the episode underscores a larger truth: The internet’s robustness is only as strong as the infrastructure that powers it.