A major outage at Cloudflare, a key company in internet infrastructure, has caused many popular websites and online platforms to go down. Sites affected include X (formerly Twitter) and Spotify.
The problems started around 12:00 UTC (5:30 p.m. IST) on Tuesday, November 18. Many users saw pages that would not load and got internal server errors, often called 500-series errors linked to Cloudflare. The spike in failures was so large that even Downdetector, a site that tracks outages, had trouble keeping up with the flood of reports.
Cloudflare acknowledged the problem on its status page. The company said it had found an issue affecting “multiple customers” across its network and noted that the 500-series errors were widespread. Even the Cloudflare Dashboard and API were hit, making it harder for the company to respond quickly.
Cloudflare says it is working to fix the problem and is looking into what caused the disruption. Some services are starting to recover, but the company warns that customers “may continue to observe higher-than-normal error rates” while they keep working on the issue.
Possible Link to Scheduled Maintenance
The timing of the outage has led some to wonder if it is linked to scheduled maintenance. Cloudflare had announced routine work at its Santiago (SCL) data centre for November 18 from 12:00 to 15:00 UTC, which matches when the problems started.
The scheduled maintenance covers key systems that handle traffic and security for Cloudflare’s global operations. Still, the company has not confirmed any official connection between the maintenance and the outage.
Impact Extends to Major Services
Cloudflare is a major provider of internet security and content delivery, saying that about 20% of all websites worldwide use its services. It is not yet clear how many sites are affected, but some well-known platforms have been hit, including:
- X (formerly Twitter)
- Spotify
- Letterboxd
There are also reports that the OpenAI chatbot, ChatGPT, has had problems. OpenAI is looking into these issues but has not said if they are directly linked to the Cloudflare outage.
This is the latest in a series of big web service failures, coming after similar outages at Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure last month. Experts say these events show how fragile the modern internet is and highlight the risks for smaller companies that depend on a few large providers.
