Syed Saif Ul Hassan 
Nov 19, 2025
The X app icon on a smartphone in this illustration taken October 27, 2025. — Reuters
Hours after affecting some of the prominent internet services, including X (formerly Twitter) and the renowned AI chatbot ChatGPT, the Cloudflare outage is reported to have been restored.
Purportedly caused by an automatically generated configuration file intended to manage security threats, the Cloudflare outage began around 6:30am (ET) on Tuesday and disrupted access to major internet platforms. The file grew overwhelmingly large and eventually caused the software system responsible for handling traffic for several Cloudflare services to crash.
The company, which manages approximately one-fifth of global web traffic, initiated an investigation and deployed a fix, according to Reuters.
It must be noted that despite the Cloudflare 'fix' update in place, some customers may still experience service disruptions during the recovery, which is gradually spreading.
Shortly after the incident, Cloudflare's shares fell by 2.3% in morning trading.
What caused the Cloudflare outage?
Regarding the root cause of the Cloudflare outage, the company stated that there is "no evidence" suggesting the disruption was due to an attack or malicious activities.
The latest Cloudflare incident prevented users from accessing platforms such as Canva, X, Grindr, and ChatGPT, leading many to report issues via Downdetector, whose data showed that reports of outages had decreased from a peak of over 11,000 to around 2,800 by 10:20am (ET).
The internet traffic regulator registered a spike in unusual traffic to one of its services starting at 11:20 UTC, which contributed to the errors experienced by users.
