Person's handing hold an iPhone displaying a Cloudflare Error while attempting to access a webpage, during an outage of the Cloudflare service, Lafayette, California, November 18, 2025.
Internet infrastructure company Cloudflare was hit by an outage on Tuesday, knocking several major websites offline for global users.
Many sites came back online within a few hours. In an update to its status page around 9:57 a.m. ET, Cloudflare said it had implemented a fix to resolve the outage, though it noted some users may still experience issues accessing its online dashboard.
"We are continuing to monitor for errors to ensure all services are back to normal," the company added.
E-commerce platform Shopify , job search engine Indeed, Anthropic's Claude chatbot, President Donald Trump's Truth Social and Elon Musk's social media platform X were among the sites impacted by the Cloudflare issues, according to Downdetector, which itself could not be accessed briefly for some users. Some of NJ Transit's digital services were brought down by the outage.
OpenAI's status page indicated ChatGPT and its Sora short-form video app were fully recovered after they experienced issues due to a "third-party service provider."
A Cloudflare spokesperson said the "root cause" of the outage was an automatically generated configuration file used to manage threat traffic that "grew beyond an expected size of entries," which triggered a crash in the software system that handles traffic for several of its services.
The company said it began to observe a "spike in unusual traffic" around 5:20 a.m. ET.
There's no evidence that the outage was a result of an attack or caused by malicious activity, the spokesperson added.
"Given the importance of Cloudflare's services, any outage is unacceptable," the spokesperson said. "We apologize to our customers and the internet general for letting you down today."
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