When Cloudflare Falters, The Internet Feels It: What Today’s Outage Showed Us

Oracle EBS Under Fire

On 18 November 2025, many users around the world woke up to a broken internet experience. Social platforms, AI tools, and other popular services started timing out or throwing error pages. A key reason is a problem inside Cloudflare’s infrastructure, which sits in front of a huge part of today’s web.

Cloudflare has said that its global network is experiencing issues and that it is investigating a server side problem. The visible effect for many customers is a wave of HTTP 500 errors and failed requests across multiple regions.

Several large platforms, including X (formerly Twitter) and OpenAI, have been affected and users have reported that timelines do not refresh, posts do not send, and some APIs simply stop responding. Outage trackers show a sharp spike in complaints, and some reports also note issues at Amazon Web Services in parallel, which increases the perception of a broader internet problem.

The result is that for many people the internet did not fully stop, but it felt unreliable and fragmented. Some sites worked, others did not, and the pattern changed minute by minute as traffic routed through different parts of the affected network.

What happened, in practical terms

Based on public information at the time of writing:

Cloudflare reported that parts of its global network are facing problems and that engineers are investigating an error condition on their servers.
Popular services that rely on Cloudflare for DNS, reverse proxying, DDoS protection, or other edge functions started to fail for many users, including X, OpenAI, and some multiplayer games.
End users mainly saw HTTP 500 error pages, requests that hang, or apps that simply did not load new content.
Third party monitoring sites recorded thousands of outage reports within a short period, confirming that this is not an isolated problem on one network.
At the same time, a separate wave of reports mentioned problems at AWS, which shows how dependent we are on a small group of providers for most of the services we use every day.

Cloudflare has not yet published a final root cause. At this point, we know that there is a provider side incident that affects a wide set of customers and that remediation is in progress.

How the outage feels for users and businesses

From the perspective of an organisation or an individual user, incidents like this look and feel chaotic.

Some SaaS tools are reachable while others fail, even though they are all used from the same device and network.
Security pages, login flows, and dashboards may become unreliable because the edge layer is misbehaving, not because the application itself is down.
Internal teams first suspect their own VPN, corporate firewall, or ISP, and only later realise that the root cause sits in an external provider.
For businesses that depend on a public website or API, every minute of downtime can translate into lost revenue, increased support tickets, and reputational impact.

The important point is that this is a systemic event that lives in the middle of the internet stack. Traditional incident response habits, which focus only on servers and applications that you own, are not enough.

Why the Cloudflare outage matters for security teams

This is not just an availability story for IT. It carries direct security implications.

Single provider as a concentration of risk

When one provider fronts DNS, CDN, and web security, that provider becomes a bottleneck. A software bug, misconfiguration, or capacity issue can affect both how your traffic flows and how your protections function.

Hidden supply chain dependencies

Even if your own websites are not behind Cloudflare, many tools in your stack likely are. Identity providers, observability platforms, CI and deployment tools, customer support systems, and more may all rely on Cloudflare. Outages there become supply chain issues for you.

Reduced visibility during turbulence

During a large incident, your logs fill with timeouts, connection errors, and retries. Distinguishing between harmless noise and active probing becomes harder. Attackers know this and sometimes increase their activity while defenders are busy firefighting.

Protection gaps during edge failures

If DDoS mitigation and web application firewalling are tied to the same edge network that is currently unstable, some traffic may bypass expected controls or be handled in an unusual way. This can expose weak points that do not exist in normal conditions.

What teams can do, starting today

Here are concrete steps organisations can take while this incident is in the news and in the days that follow.

Build and maintain a map of dependencies
- List which of your domains and APIs sit behind Cloudflare or similar edge providers.
- Include critical vendors and SaaS tools, not only first party services.
- Update this map regularly so it reflects reality, not only architecture diagrams.
Plan for failover and graceful degradation
- Consider secondary DNS providers where your risk profile justifies it.
- Define how your service should degrade if external providers fail, for example read only mode or reduced features.
- Test these scenarios so they become muscle memory, not theoretical plans.
Strengthen monitoring, from the edge inward
- Monitor uptime and latency from multiple geographic probes so you detect when a problem is regional or provider specific.
- Correlate your alerts with public provider status feeds and independent outage trackers.
- Use simple internal runbooks that help teams quickly classify an incident as internal or upstream.
Treat outages as security relevant events
- When an edge provider struggles, increase sensitivity for phishing, domain impersonation, and opportunistic attacks.
- Review which protections rely entirely on the affected provider and identify compensating controls that you can apply locally.
Communicate clearly with your stakeholders
- Prepare simple, non technical explanations for business teams and customers that describe what is happening and what you are doing.
- Avoid speculation about root cause until the provider publishes confirmed information.
- Capture lessons learned once the incident is over and integrate them into your continuity planning.

ThreatMon Insights

Large scale infrastructure incidents are now a recurring part of the internet environment, not a rare surprise. Any serious security strategy must include preparedness for outages at DNS, CDN, and cloud providers.
Incidents like today’s Cloudflare outage highlight how thin the line is between availability and security. When the systems that deliver traffic are also the systems that protect it, failures have a double effect.
Organisations that understand their third party dependencies, monitor their exposure in real time, and rehearse failover procedures will handle these events with less confusion and lower risk.

As ThreatMon, we will keep monitoring the Cloudflare situation and related outage patterns, including any threat activity that tries to take advantage of the disruption. We will continue to share insights with our community as more technical details and root cause information become available.