Cloudflare's global downfall 18 November 2025: What happened, its impact and why La Codería was not affected
He 18 November 2025, A massive Cloudflare outage paralyzed much of the Internet for several hours. Since Cloudflare is one of the pillars of the global web infrastructure, Its fall caused a domino effect on thousands of services. In this summary we review what happened, what caused it, What services were affected and why La Codería did not suffer any interruption.
1. What happened to Cloudflare 18/11/2025?
Onset and duration of the incident
- The failure began around 11:20 UTC (12:20 in mainland Spain).
- From that moment, Cloudflare started to crash badly, preventing your network from delivering traffic normally.
- Users saw internal errors such as “Internal server error”, indicative that the problem was within Cloudflare.
- The company acknowledged the incident shortly after and confirmed it was investigating..
Evolution of the blackout
- During the afternoon (European time), services fluctuated: falls, partial recoveries and new interruptions.
- After some four hours unstable operation, Cloudflare considered the incident “resolved” around 16:00 CET.
- Nevertheless, complete stability did not arrive until approximately 17:06 UTC, according to the technical report.
- In total, The main outage lasted several hours and affected all critical Cloudflare systems.
2. The cause: an internal bug, not a cyber attack
Cloudflare confirmed that this was not an attack or malicious activity. The problem was totally internal:
The technical origin
- A change in the permissions of a database cluster caused a faulty query.
- This generated a configuration file (“feature file”) used by the bot management system… but with invalid data and excessive size.
- every five minutes, this file is distributed globally to the Cloudflare network.
- When exceeding the maximum size that the software could process, the servers were just crashing.
Why the fall was intermittent
- Only some nodes generated the faulty file; others generated a valid one.
- Depending on which one was distributed in each five-minute cycle, the network:
- temporarily recovered, o
- fell again immediately.
The solution
- Cloudflare stopped the propagation of the faulty file.
- Reverted to a valid version and rebooted affected systems.
- Traffic began to normalize around 14:30 UTC, after stopping the root cause.
Cloudflare Response
- The company described the incident as "unacceptable".
- Its CEO apologized and promised new safeguards:
- stricter limits on configuration files,
- rapid shutdown systems of problematic configurations,
- internal reviews to prevent similar failures.
3. Affected services and global reach
Since Cloudflare manages around 20% of global web traffic, the impact was enormous. Thousands of sites and apps were affected.
Services affected
Social networks
- X (Twitter) stopped loading content or prevented publishing.
- Morocco, Menéame and other community services showed errors.
Artificial intelligence
- ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity AI and DeepSeek are almost completely down.
- Only non-Cloudflare dependent services (like Gemini the Copilot) they remained stable.
Online video games
- League of Legends and Valorant suffered massive outages.
- Platforms like Battle.net reported serious connection failures.
Popular web services
- Canva stopped working for hours.
- Bet365, Grindr and some banking services were also affected.
Transportation applications
- Uber and delivery services suffered cuts in certain countries.
Monitoring sites
- Even tools like Downdetector failed because they depend on Cloudflare.
Geographic reach
The fall was global, affecting users in Europe, Latin America, North America and Asia. Any region with services using Cloudflare felt the impact.
Internal systems affected
Among the damaged domestic products were:
- CDN and security services (widespread 5xx errors),
- Turnstile (verification system),
- Workers KV (global storage),
- Administration Dashboard,
- Email Security,
- Cloudflare Access (Zero Trust authentication).
4. Reactions: confusion, memes and transparency
Users and technical community
- Messages multiplied on social networks asking if “the Internet was down”.
- X, being partially down, further complicated the dissemination of information.
- There was no shortage of memes, remembering previous Cloudflare crashes.
Affected companies
- Many companies reported that their problems were due to third-party failures.
- Cloudflare was updating its status page and publishing progress.
- After solving it, Its CEO shared an extensive technical report and apologized publicly.
5. Impact and lessons: The Internet is more fragile than it seems
This incident reopened the debate on internet centralization. When one of its pillars fails, the impact is instantaneous and global.
Recent context
- It happened just weeks after big AWS and Azure outages.
- The proximity of these incidents highlights the dependence on few key suppliers.
Main lesson
Design systems with redundancy and resilience. Trust the 100% in a single supplier (Cloudflare, AWS, etc.) can be a significant risk.
6. Why La Codería did not fall: We don't use Cloudflare
While thousands of websites collapsed, La Codería and our clients continued standing without a single problem. The reason? We do not depend on Cloudflare.
Why we avoid using Cloudflare?
Although it offers advantages such as CDN, hidden, SSL and anti-DDoS protection, we avoid using it for an essential reason for our users:
The League blocks Cloudflare IPs during broadcasts.
Especially:
- The Spanish League full of preventive blocks against pirate transmissions.
- When detecting illegal streaming on a Cloudflare IP, they order to block that IP.
- Result: legit sites that share IP (like blogs or forums) are inaccessible to many users, without having done anything wrong.
This has affected:
- Technical blogs,
- Forums,
- Personal pages,
- Any site sharing the “wrong” IP on Cloudflare.
There were even cases of:
- Sites legally warned due to other users using the same Cloudflare IP.
- Operators legally obliged to block common IPs.
Our decision
At La Codería we prioritize that no one is unfairly blocked. That's why:
- We do not use Cloudflare.
- We do not share IPs with potential pirate broadcasters.
- We control our own caching and security solutions.
Thanks to this:
- We avoid blockages related to football matches.
- and he 18/11/2025 we do not suffer no impact due to the massive drop.
Conclusion
Cloudflare's global downfall 18 November 2025 showed how fragile the Internet can be when so much infrastructure depends on a few actors. A simple poorly generated file caused massive failures on social networks, video games, financial services, AI tools and more.
Cloudflare resolved the issue and assumed responsibility. But the event leaves a clear lesson: not depend on a single supplier for critical services.
The Codería remained fully operational because We don't use Cloudflare, decision that we made for very practical reasons and that today is proven correct.
We will continue to share infrastructure analysis and technical decisions designed to offer the best experience to our community.
