Breaking Technology

Internet Shuts Down: Cloudflare Outage Cripples X, ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity

18/11/2025
Shiva

A major service degradation at internet infrastructure giant Cloudflare has triggered a massive, cascading outage across the web today, taking down some of the most visible and heavily used platforms, including X (formerly Twitter), ChatGPT, Google Gemini, and Perplexity AI.1

The widespread disruption highlights the fragility of the modern internet and the immense dependency a vast number of services—especially cutting-edge AI platforms—have on a handful of critical Content Delivery Network (CDN) providers.2

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📉 The Outage: Widespread 500 Errors Confirmed

The issues began surfacing around [Time based on search results, e.g., 11:00 AM UTC/5:30 PM IST] with reports of widespread 500 Internal Server Errors on sites that utilize Cloudflare’s network for traffic management, security, and content delivery.3

Platforms Confirmed Affected:

CategoryAffected Services
Generative AIChatGPT (OpenAI), Google Gemini, Perplexity AI
Social MediaX (formerly Twitter)
Streaming/MediaSpotify, LetterboxD
Creative/UtilityCanva, League of Legends

Even Downdetector, the platform users rely on to report and track outages, was reportedly affected, temporarily showing an error itself—a stark demonstration of Cloudflare’s deep integration into the web’s core.4

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📢 Cloudflare’s Response and The Cause

Cloudflare quickly acknowledged the issue on its status page, initially reporting:5

“Cloudflare is aware of, and investigating an issue which impacts multiple customers: Widespread 500 errors, Cloudflare Dashboard and API also failing.6 We are working to understand the full impact and mitigate this problem.”7

The specific root cause is currently under investigation, though some earlier reports pointed to an “internal service degradation” or a failure linked to one of its critical dependency services, such as a localized issue involving its WARP or underlying storage infrastructure.8 Updates are continuing to be released as the company focuses on remediation.9

Cloudflare has since reported seeing services begin to recover, but users are warned they may still “continue to observe higher-than-normal error rates.”12 The full fallout in terms of traffic, revenue loss, and the underlying technical cause will become clear in the coming days.

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