Cloudflare Global Network Failure

• Cloudflare’s global network had a major internal service degradation.
• Outage caused widespread 500 errors across many major websites.
• X, ChatGPT, and Truth Social were among affected platforms.
• Cloudflare is investigating; services are now gradually recovering.

GG News Bureau
New Delhi, 18th Nov: A substantial failure within Cloudflare’s core global network on Tuesday morning sent ripples across the internet, causing widespread outages and access issues for numerous major online services. The incident began around 6:00 AM ET (11:00 UTC), leading to an immediate surge in reports on the Downdetector service.

The disruption affected a broad range of sites that rely on Cloudflare for content delivery, security, and traffic routing. Affected platforms included Elon Musk’s X (formerly Twitter), where users took to the site to confirm issues. The outage also hit OpenAI’s ChatGPT and President Donald Trump’s Truth Social.

Visitors to the impacted sites encountered various error messages, most commonly an “internal server error on Cloudflare’s network” or a security challenge prompt to “Please unblock challenges.cloudflare.com to proceed,” effectively blocking access to services like the popular chatbot. Even prominent online games, such as League of Legends, reported problems.

Cloudflare acknowledged the severity of the incident, initially reporting: “Cloudflare is aware of, and investigating an issue which impacts multiple customers: Widespread 500 errors, Cloudflare Dashboard and API also failing.”

In a bizarre display of the outage’s reach, the company’s own status page briefly appeared to be malfunctioning, losing its design elements. By approximately 7:03 AM ET, the company updated its status, confirming that while its workers were “continuing to investigate this issue,” they were also “seeing services recover.”

Despite the recovery efforts, Cloudflare advised that customers should anticipate “higher-than-normal error rates” as remediation continues. The specific root cause of the “internal service degradation” has not yet been identified by the firm.