Cloudflare Outage Jolts the Internet – What Happened, and Who Was Hit

Cloudflare outage causes slow sites, login trouble and dashboard errors as users report problems even after the company says service is restored.

On the morning of November 18, 2025, web users around the world, including Hackread.com readers, began encountering error pages and inaccessible apps. The disruption originated with Cloudflare, Inc., a web-infrastructure company whose network handles an estimated 20% of global web traffic.

What went wrong

At about 6:40 a.m. ET (11:40 UTC), Cloudflare logged “internal service degradation” after an unusually large traffic event hit one of its services, causing elevated error rates across its network. The company’s status page listed “degraded performance” for core functions like Bot Management and Edge Network.

Later in the day, Cloudflare’s Chief Technology Officer, Dane Knecht, publicly addressed the disruption, stating: “I won’t mince words: earlier today we failed our customers and the broader Internet when a ...