Liputan6.com, Jakarta On November 18, 2025, the internet was shocked by a global service outage affecting Cloudflare, a provider of crucial internet infrastructure.
This incident left millions of websites and online services worldwide inaccessible or experiencing serious disruptions for several hours.
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Many major platforms such as X, ChatGPT, Spotify, and Zoom were affected, demonstrating Cloudflare's vital role in today's digital ecosystem.
Cloudflare immediately responded to the incident, identified the cause, and worked to restore service.
"We apologise to our customers and the Internet in general for letting you down today," it said in a statement.
Global Cloudflare Outage Details
The Cloudflare service outage began around 11:20 UTC (or 5:20 AM EST) on November 18, 2025.
During this time, users worldwide reported difficulty accessing various websites, with many displaying error messages.
The impact of the outage was widespread, affecting popular platforms such as X (formerly Twitter), ChatGPT, OpenAI, Spotify, Discord, Zoom, Canva, League of Legends, IKEA, Uber, and Indeed.
Some site owners were unable to access their performance dashboards on Cloudflare, and core services such as CDN, DDoS protection, and DNS were also disrupted.
Cloudflare confirmed that the primary cause of the outage was not a cyberattack or malicious activity.
The incident was caused by an error in a configuration file automatically generated to manage threat traffic, as reported by BBC.
The configuration file grew beyond its expected size, causing the software system handling traffic for several Cloudflare services to crash.
A permissions change in one of Cloudflare's database systems also contributed to the issue, causing unexpected duplicate entries in the "feature files" used by their Bot Management system.
These enlarged feature files were then propagated across Cloudflare's network, and the software running the engine had a lower file size limit, resulting in a system outage.
Current Status and Preventive Measures
After hours of efforts, Cloudflare's core services were largely restored by 2:30 PM UTC the same day, and full recovery was achieved by 1:06 AM on November 19, 2025.
The total duration of the outage was approximately 4 hours and 10 minutes, although some services experienced brief degradation for several additional hours.
Cloudflare has implemented a fix by stopping the creation and deployment of new Bot Management configuration files and replacing the corrupted files with previous versions.
Matthew Prince, Cloudflare's co-founder and CEO, apologized for the incident.
As a precautionary measure, Cloudflare stated that it would strengthen its configuration file ingestion and distribution processes, enable global kill switches for certain features, and review the failure modes of its core proxy module.
These steps are expected to prevent a recurrence of similar incidents in the future.
Furthermore, Cloudflare also has scheduled maintenance at its Frankfurt (FRA) and Atlanta (ATL) data centers on November 19, 2025.
During this maintenance, traffic may be rerouted, potentially causing a slight increase in latency for end users in the affected regions.
The incident also impacted the stock market, with Cloudflare shares falling 2.8%.
Getting to Know: Cloudflare and Its Core Services
Cloudflare, Inc. is an American company that provides various internet services to improve the performance, security, and reliability of websites and applications.
The company operates as a global Content Delivery Network (CDN), distributing web content through more than 330 data centers worldwide.
This allows users to access content from the closest server, significantly reducing load times and improving the user experience.
In terms of cybersecurity, Cloudflare provides protection against DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attacks by filtering malicious traffic before it reaches the origin server.
They also offer a Web Application Firewall (WAF) to block common web exploits such as SQL injection and cross-site scripting (XSS).
Cloudflare protects millions of internet properties, blocking over 57 billion attacks per day.
Furthermore, Cloudflare provides DNS (Domain Name System) services that translate domain names into IP addresses, including the free 1.1.1.1 DNS service that protects user privacy.
The company also acts as a reverse proxy between a user's browser and a website's origin server, performing load balancing, masking the origin server's IP address for added security, and handling SSL/TLS encryption.
With its massive scale and influence, Cloudflare is one of the largest networks in the world, serving millions of internet properties and responsible for approximately 10% of all internet traffic.
According to W3Techs, Cloudflare was used by approximately 19.3% of all websites for its web security services as of January 2025, processing an average of 81 million HTTP requests per second.