Major Cloudflare outage hits ChatGPT, Uber, Spotify
Editor’s note: This issue was resolved at 2:28 PM Eastern Standard Time, approximately 8 hours after it was first reported.
Here we go again. On November 18, 2025, yet another major cloud outage disrupted service to many popular web apps, this time including ChatGPT, Uber, Spotify, and many others.
According to Cloudflare via cloudflarestatus, the problems started early in the morning for U.S.-based internet users. While the issue was spotted quickly by the Cloudflare team, it took a couple of hours for them to identify the root cause and to implement a fix. However, even hours after a fix was deployed, reports of errors persisted.
Timeline of the Cloudflare outage on Nov 18, 2025
All times are in Eastern Standard Time (New York)
- 11:27 AM: “We continue to see errors and latency improve but still have reports of intermittent errors. The team continues to monitor the situation as it improves, and looking for ways to accelerate full recovery.“
- 10:40 AM: “The team is continuing to focus on restoring service post-fix. We are mitigating several issues that remain post-deployment.“
- 9:42 AM: “A fix has been implemented and we believe the incident is now resolved. We are continuing to monitor for errors to ensure all services are back to normal.“
- 8:09 AM: “The issue has been identified and a fix is being implemented.”
- 6:48 AM: “Cloudflare is experiencing an internal service degradation. Some services may be intermittently impacted. We are focused on restoring service. We will update as we are able to remediate.”
The real-time outage dashboard on Downdetector (owned by Ookla, our sister brand that is also part of the Ziff Davis family) mirrors this timeline, with the heaviest volume of outage reports coming in at around 9AM Eastern Standard Time, when many workers log into their computers to start their days. In addition to the Cloudflare service itself, Downdetector reported similar outages for X (Twitter), League of Legends, and OpenAI.
What caused the Cloudflare outage?
According to Mashable (also a sister property that is part of the Ziff Davis umbrella), the outage was not due to an malicious attack. Instead, it seems that an oversight was to blame, with a file growing too large causing software to crash.
Regarding the outage, Mashable received the following statement from sources at Cloudflare: “Many of Cloudflare’s services experienced a significant outage today beginning around 11:20 UTC. It was fully resolved at 14:30 UTC. The root cause of the outage was a configuration file that is automatically generated to manage threat traffic. The file grew beyond an expected size of entries and triggered a crash in the software system that handles traffic for a number of Cloudflare’s services. To be clear, there is no evidence that this was the result of an attack or caused by malicious activity. We expect that some Cloudflare services will be briefly degraded as traffic naturally spikes post incident but we expect all services to return to normal in the next few hours.”
Are cloud outages becoming the new normal?
This latest Cloudflare outage becomes the third such major incident in the last 30 days. On October 20, 2025 an AWS outage took down Hulu, Roblox, Snapchat, and more. Just a week later, on October 29, 2025 an Azure outage disrupted popular Microsoft services such as Teams, Outlook, Entra ID, Minecraft, some airline services, and more.
As more of our favorite apps, games, and services rely on just a few key cloud-based providers, even minor service outages will continue to have cascading effects that impact internet users worldwide.
