Cyberspace: Cloudflare apologises to clients over outage disrupting X, ChatGPT

*Cloudflare, a major global Internet infrastructure firm, apologises to customers, and Internet consumers in general globally, for ‘letting them down’ during the service outage Tuesday, November 18, 2025

Gbenga Kayode | ConsumerConnect

Following recent disruptions that took down some global tech giants from cyberspace, Cloudflare, a major Internet infrastructure firm, has apologised to its customers, and the Internet consumers in general for letting them down Tuesday, November 18, 2025.

ConsumerConnect reports the outage Tuesday affected a number of high-profile Web sites, including X and ChatGPT due to problems affecting Cloudflare.

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Sequel to the worldwide disruption to Internet access, thousands of consumers began to report issues with the named sites, as well as other services, to outage monitoring site Downdetector.

During the period Tuesday, a wide range of apps and Web sites were impacted by the outage.

Digital consumers also reported encountering delays or technical issues when trying to access services, such as Grindr, Zoom and Canva.

The Internet infrastructure company, in a statement issued Tuesday said: “Given the importance of Cloudflare’s services, any outage is unacceptable.”

Why the global service outage

Cloudflare has explained Tuesday’s problem was the result of a technical problem.

The Internet infrastructure company stated: “To be clear, there is no evidence that this was the result of an attack or caused by malicious activity.”

 

Affirming the relatively low quality of consumer experience during the service outage, Cloudflare stated the “significant outage” occurred after a configuration file designed to handle threat traffic did not work as intended, and “triggered a crash” in its software handling traffic for its wider services.

The company said: “We apologise to our customers and the Internet in general for letting you down today.

“Given the importance of Cloudflare’s services, any outage is unacceptable.”

It, however, noted though the issue has been resolved, some services might still encounter errors as they came back online.

Meanwhile social media platform X (formerly Twitter) was displaying a message on its homepage for some users, which said there was a problem with its internal server due to an “error” originating with Cloudflare.

Likewise, ChatGPT’s site was also displaying an error message, informing some consumers: “Please unblock challenges Cloudflare.com to proceed.”

An error message reading “please unblock challenges cloudflare.com to proceed.”

Cloudflare is a huge provider of Internet security across the world.

The company performs services, such as checking visitor connections to sites are coming from humans rather than bots.

It says 20 percent of all Web sites worldwide use its services in some form.

During the Internet outage Tuesday, the range of sites affected was demonstrated by the fact Downdetector itself – a site many flock to when sites stop loading or appear to have issues – also displayed an error message as many tried to access it.

Speaking on the development, Alp Toker, Director of NetBlocks, which monitors the connectivity of web services, said the outage “points to a catastrophic disruption to Cloudflare’s infrastructure”.

Toker told BBC News: “What’s striking is how much of the internet has had to hide behind Cloudflare infrastructure to avoid denial of service attacks in recent years.”

He also highlighted how the company aims to protect sites against malicious attempts to overwhelm them with traffic requests.

He, nonetheless, submitted that as a result of this, and the convenience of its services, it had also become “one of the internet’s largest single points of failure.”

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