A major portion of the internet went offline for millions on Tuesday after Cloudflare, a leading global web infrastructure and security provider, experienced a massive outage.
Users trying to access everything from major platforms like X to small personal sites were met with 500 Internal Server Errors. In an ironic twist, DownDetector — the go-to site for tracking outages — also went down since it relies on Cloudflare, leaving people unable to gauge the scale of the disruption.
The outage was severe. Cloudflare’s Turnstile, its CAPTCHA alternative, failed worldwide, preventing logins and verification on countless websites. Even older CAPTCHA prompts displayed errors asking users to “Please unblock challenges.cloudflare.com,” despite the issue stemming from Cloudflare’s servers.
Website owners were also unable to access Cloudflare Dashboards, blocking any effort to diagnose or resolve the issue. From personal blogs to major landing pages, large parts of the internet came to a standstill.
Cloudflare Status
In progress – Scheduled maintenance is underway. Updates will follow as needed. Nov 18, 2025 – 12:00 UTC
IT teams stated that maintenance was being performed at the PPT (Tahiti) datacenter between 12:00 and 16:00 UTC, with traffic rerouting possibly causing latency and temporary network unavailability for users and PNI/CNI customers in the region.
Websites using Cloudflare’s proxy services were most affected, while those not routed through Cloudflare remained accessible.
The outage underscores how heavily the modern internet relies on centralized infrastructure. When a major provider like Cloudflare faces issues, the impact spreads worldwide — a reminder of how fragile even core digital systems can be.
Also Read: Canva Restored Services Following Widespread Global Outage
