According to Forbes, Cloudflare experienced a major outage on Tuesday, November 18 that impacted over 4,000 networks and services. The disruption affected major platforms including Spotify, X, PayPal, Canva, Letterboxd, and even ChatGPT, with many users experiencing intermittent access requiring multiple reload attempts. Cloudflare acknowledged investigating an issue potentially impacting multiple customers and provided frequent updates on their status page. The company initially suggested services were recovering but then encountered new problems, specifically disabling WARP access in London around 8:04 a.m. Eastern time. By 8:13 a.m. Eastern, Cloudflare reported that Access and WARP services had recovered to pre-incident error levels and re-enabled London WARP access, though the root cause remains undisclosed.
The domino effect of modern infrastructure
Here’s the thing about Cloudflare – they’re basically the internet’s backbone for a huge chunk of the web. When their systems hiccup, everything from your Spotify playlist to your ChatGPT conversation can suddenly vanish. And this isn’t the first time we’ve seen this kind of cascading failure – remember when Amazon Web Services went down in October and took half the internet with it?
What’s interesting is how these infrastructure providers have become so critical that a single company’s technical issues can disrupt thousands of unrelated services. Cloudflare’s WARP service, which creates encrypted connections between users and their network, was specifically called out in this outage. They had to disable it in London temporarily while working on fixes. Makes you wonder – are we building an internet that’s too fragile?
The slow road back online
Cloudflare’s been pretty transparent with their status page, which is more than you can say for some companies during outages. They identified the issue and implemented a fix, but here’s the catch – they haven’t actually told us what went wrong. And there’s no timeline for when everything will be completely normal.
The pattern here is familiar: initial outage, partial recovery, discovery of additional problems, more fixes. It’s like untangling Christmas lights – you think you’ve got it, then another knot appears. For now, all we can do is wait while they work through the remaining issues. Basically, if your favorite site isn’t loading perfectly yet, you’re not alone.
