Cloudflare Global Network Outage: Investigation Continues as Partial Recovery Begins, but Errors Persist

Cloudflare, one of the world’s largest internet infrastructure providers, experienced a significant global disruption on November 18, 2025. The outage impacted millions of websites, APIs, dashboards, and online services that rely on Cloudflare’s global edge network. Throughout the incident, Cloudflare released multiple official updates, confirming widespread 500 errors, disruptions across the Cloudflare Dashboard, API failures, and degraded performance worldwide.

As of 12:37 UTC, Cloudflare engineers are still actively investigating the root cause of the outage, although partial recovery is underway.

📌 Full Timeline of Cloudflare’s Official Status Updates

🕒 12:37 UTC — Update

“We are continuing to investigate this issue.”

Despite earlier signs of service recovery, Cloudflare confirms that the issue is not yet resolved, and investigation is ongoing. This suggests deeper systemic or infrastructure-level challenges affecting stability.

🕒 12:21 UTC — Update

“We are seeing services recover, but customers may continue to observe higher-than-normal error rates as we continue remediation efforts.”

This marked the first positive development of the day. Some edge locations began recovering, routing stabilized slightly, and fewer users experienced complete downtime. However, elevated error rates indicate that full recovery is still in progress.

🕒 12:03 UTC — Update

“We are continuing to investigate this issue.”

This interim update signaled that Cloudflare had not yet isolated the root cause and that customers continued to experience widespread service degradation.

🕒 11:48 UTC — Investigating

“Cloudflare is aware of, and investigating an issue which impacts multiple customers: Widespread 500 errors, Cloudflare Dashboard and API also failing.
We are working to understand the full impact and mitigate this problem. More updates to follow shortly.”

This was the first confirmation of the major global incident. The widespread 500 errors indicated that Cloudflare’s edge servers were failing to process requests, affecting websites and applications globally.

🌎 Global Impact: What Services Were Affected?

Cloudflare’s role as a high-performance CDN, security provider, DNS operator, and reverse proxy means that any outage can have immediate and far-reaching consequences.

The following services were impacted:

• Websites & Web Apps — experiencing 500/502/503 errors
• Cloudflare Dashboard — inaccessible or unstable
• Cloudflare API — failing or timing out
• Zero Trust Access — login issues and interruptions
• Workers & Pages — deployments disrupted
• DNS resolution — intermittent failures
• Security features — rate limiting, WAF, and firewall rules delayed

Due to Cloudflare’s Anycast architecture, disruptions occur simultaneously across hundreds of data centers.

📉 Why This Outage Was So Severe

Large Cloudflare outages typically relate to one of the following deep-rooted technical issues:

1. A faulty global configuration deployment

Cloudflare pushes configuration updates worldwide within minutes.
A misconfigured rule or deployment may cause:

• cascading 500 errors
• API failures
• dashboard crashes
• instability across POPs

2. BGP routing issues

Cloudflare uses BGP extensively to direct global traffic.
A malformed route could remove entire data centers from the network, triggering global failure.

3. Failure of internal Cloudflare systems

If a core service (caching, rate limiting, routing orchestration, authentication) fails, everything depending on it collapses.

4. Distributed overload or attack-related destabilization

If Cloudflare’s massive DDoS mitigation layer becomes unstable, traffic can overwhelm nodes.

Given the continued investigation at 12:37 UTC, the root cause may be complex or multi-layered.

⚠️ Current State: Partial Recovery with Persistent Errors

Cloudflare has confirmed that services are recovering, but users may continue to see:

• elevated 500 error rates
• intermittent downtime
• slow website load times
• API request failures
• dashboard login issues
• functional instability in some geographic regions

This is typical during early stages of global network recovery, as traffic is rerouted and unhealthy nodes are isolated.

💼 Impact on Businesses Worldwide

With Cloudflare powering a large portion of the modern internet, the outage affected key areas:

E-commerce

• Checkout failures
• Slow product pages
• Payment API timeouts

SaaS Platforms

• Dashboard errors
• Incomplete data loading
• Login failures

Financial Services

• API latency
• Degraded customer portals

Enterprise IT

• Zero Trust login failures
• Blocked access to protected apps

Developers

• Broken CI/CD workflows
• Failed API integrations
• Worker deployment interruptions

Cloudflare’s role as an intermediary means that outages instantly ripple across dependent platforms.

🔧 What Cloudflare Is Likely Doing Behind the Scenes

Although Cloudflare has not released technical details, the following remediation steps are typical:

• rolling back recent global configuration pushes
• restarting internal network orchestration services
• draining traffic from unhealthy POPs
• rebalancing load across stable regions
• cleaning or resetting routing tables
• reissuing health checks across global nodes
• isolating faulty components
• coordinating cross-team emergency response

Given the scale of Cloudflare’s infrastructure, the stabilization process can take time even after initial fixes are deployed.

📢 What to Expect Next

Cloudflare will continue to:

• issue additional status updates
• restore full stability region-by-region
• reduce error rates
• confirm full resolution once achieved

A post-incident report (PIR) will likely follow, providing:

• the exact root cause
• affected services
• timeline of events
• remediation steps
• prevention strategy for future incidents

Cloudflare is known for transparent, technical analyses following major events.

📌 Conclusion

The Cloudflare outage on November 18, 2025, represents a significant moment for global internet infrastructure. With millions of websites and applications affected, the incident highlights how deeply interconnected the web has become—and how a single provider’s disruption can cause worldwide instability.

Although partial recovery is underway, Cloudflare continues to investigate the root cause, and customers may still experience elevated error rates until the remediation process is fully complete.

More updates from Cloudflare are expected soon.