Why Many Websites Went Down – Cloudflare
Many websites around the world experienced widespread downtime earlier on Tuesday, as a technical issue in Cloudflare’s network disrupted access to major online platforms and services.
Dane Knecht, Cloudflare’s Chief Technology Officer (CTO), addressed the outage in a statement on X, saying: “I won’t mince words: earlier today we failed our customers and the broader Internet when a problem in @Cloudflare network impacted large amounts of traffic that rely on us. The sites, businesses, and organizations that rely on Cloudflare depend on us being available and I apologize for the impact that we caused.”
I won’t mince words: earlier today we failed our customers and the broader Internet when a problem in @Cloudflare network impacted large amounts of traffic that rely on us. The sites, businesses, and organizations that rely on Cloudflare depend on us being available and I…
— Dane Knecht (@dok2001) November 18, 2025
Knecht explained that the outage was caused by a “latent bug in a service underpinning our bot mitigation capability” that started to crash after a routine configuration change.
He emphasized that the issue was not the result of an attack, but rather a technical glitch that cascaded into broad degradation across Cloudflare’s network and services.
“Transparency about what happened matters, and we plan to share a breakdown with more details in a few hours,” Knecht added.
“That issue, the impact it caused, and time to resolution is unacceptable. Work is already underway to make sure it does not happen again, but I know it caused real pain today. The trust our customers place in us is what we value the most and we are going to do what it takes to earn that back.”
The incident highlights the growing dependency of websites and online services on major infrastructure providers like Cloudflare, which manage large volumes of Internet traffic and security for millions of sites globally.