By Alia Shoaib, Shane Croucher, and Matt Cannon
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Cloudflare experienced a "spike in unusual traffic” shortly before errors broke out across many major websites it serves, the internet infrastructure company told Newsweek. Read the full story here.
Several major websites—including ChatGPT, X, Spotify, Facebook, Truth Social, DoorDash and Zoom—suffered outages or disruption after an issue, with visitors advised to "unblock challenges.cloudflare.com to proceed."
Cloudflare said at 9:42 a.m ET that it had implemented a fix and believed the issue was "now resolved." Websites that had been down appeared to be restored.
Cloudflare said the cause of the outage was a configuration file that is automatically generated to manage threat traffic.
Spokesperson Jackie Dutton said in a statement that there was no evidence of a cyberattack or malicious activity, Bloomberg reported. “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,” Dutton said.
What To Know
- Cloudflare services are used by websites widely across the internet
- Several major websites, digital platforms experienced issues
- Investigation underway at Cloudflare to find the cause
- Latest disruption follows a recent major Amazon Web Services outage
This live blog is now closed.
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Nov 18, 2025 at 09:52 AM EST
Cloudflare Says Issue ‘Now Resolved’
Cloudflare has said it implemented a fix and "we believe the incident is now resolved."
"We are continuing to monitor for errors to ensure all services are back to normal," the update was shared at 9:42 a.m. ET added.
Websites which had been suffering issues appear to be returning to normal service.
Nov 18, 2025 at 09:45 AM EST
Cloudflare Tells Newsweek It Had ‘Spike in Unusual Traffic’
Cloudflare experienced a "spike in unusual traffic” shortly before errors broke out across many major websites it serves.
An emailed statement at 9:32 a.m. ET said: “We saw a spike in unusual traffic to one of Cloudflare's services beginning at 11:20 UTC. That caused some traffic passing through Cloudflare's network to experience errors. We do not yet know the cause of the spike in unusual traffic.”
“We are all hands on deck to make sure all traffic is served without errors. After that, we will turn our attention to investigating the cause of the unusual spike in traffic. We will post updates to cloudflarestatus.com and more in-depth analysis when it is ready to blog.cloudflare.com. “
Nov 18, 2025 at 09:01 AM EST
What Does ‘Unblock Challenges’ Mean?
As we've been reporting, several websites have been directing visitors to "“please unblock challenges.cloudflare.com to proceed" amid this morning's outage problems.
The error message typically appears when Cloudflare’s security system flags a connection as suspicious, such as the use of a VPN or unusual network activity, or in this case, by broader service disruption preventing normal verification.
Nov 18, 2025 at 08:58 AM EST
ChatGPT, X, Spotify, Politico—Which Websites Are Hit?
DownDetector, a website that tracks real-time outages for online services, shows users are reporting ssues with several major websites this Tuesday morning.
Significant disruption was reported on X, OpenAI, and Spotify Amazon Web Services sites. ChatGPT, Truth Social and political news outlet Politico also appear to be suffering.
Others include Grindr, Google, Canva, Uber, Truth Social, DoorDash, Zoom, Facebook, Quizlet, Indeed and AI platforms such as Character.ai and Claude AI.
Spikes were also noted for the online game League of Legends and fan fiction website Archive of our Own. It is not immediately clear if all of the outages are linked.
Many of the wesbites advise, "Please unblock challenges.cloudflare.com to proceed."
Nov 18, 2025 at 08:40 AM EST
Previous Cloudflare Outages That Rocked the Internet
Cloudflare has experienced several major outages in recent years.
- In July 2019, it suffered a nearly 30-minute global disruption caused by a faulty Web Application Firewall rule
- It also suffered another significant outage in June 2022, when a network configuration error affected 19 data centers and shut down several major websites.
Nov 18, 2025 at 08:31 AM EST
Cloudflare Says Issue ‘Identified’
Cloudflare said in an update at 13:09 UTC that "the issue has been identified and a fix is being implemented."
"We have made changes that have allowed Cloudflare Access and WARP to recover. Error levels for Access and WARP users have returned to pre-incident rates," it added.
It said it is continuing to work towards restoring services.
Nov 18, 2025 at 08:18 AM EST
Today’s Issue Highlights Wider Problems—Cybersecurity Expert
A cybersecurity expert has said today's Cloudflare outage speaks to a wider issue in how the internet is run.
Graeme Stuart, head of the public sector at cybersecurity firm Check Point, pointed to other recent issues with other cloud infrastructure providers, telling Sky News: "Cloudflare going down today sits in the same pattern we saw with the recent AWS and Azure outages. These platforms are vast, efficient and used by almost every part of modern life."
He noted that many organisations run their operations through one route with no meaningful backup, meaning that there is no fallback if it fails.
"The internet was meant to be resilient through distribution, yet we have ended up concentrating huge amounts of global traffic into a handful of cloud providers."
Nov 18, 2025 at 07:44 AM EST
Cloudflare Issues Update on ‘Error Rates’
Cloudflare said in its latest update at 12:21 UTC: “We are seeing services recover, but customers may continue to observe higher-than-normal error rates as we continue remediation efforts.”
Cloudflare is an American web infrastructure company that is used by roughly 20.4 percent of all websites on the Internet.
Nov 18, 2025 at 07:42 AM EST
ChatGPT Suffers ‘Partial Outage’
OpenAI’s ChatGPT has reported a “partial outage” for some users and said it was investigating the issue.
Users attempting to access various websites reported receiving the error message “please unblock challenges.cloudflare.com to proceed.” The same message briefly appeared on Truth Social.
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