A major Cloudflare outage on November 18 caused widespread disruptions across several high-traffic platforms, temporarily knocking services like X (Twitter), ChatGPT, Spotify, Canva, Claude, and others offline for millions of users worldwide.
According to Cloudflare’s official status page, multiple datacenters in North America, Europe, Asia, and Latin America were affected during scheduled maintenance. The company said traffic rerouting during the process led to latency spikes and intermittent connection failures.
“Cloudflare is aware of, and investigating an issue which impacts multiple customers: Widespread 500 errors, Cloudflare Dashboard and API also failing. We are working to understand the full impact and mitigate this problem,” the company stated.
Cloudflare also confirmed that its support portal provider experienced additional technical issues, causing some customers to see errors while accessing support tools. However, it noted that essential communication channels remained available.
“Responses on customer inquiries are not affected, and customers can still reach us via live chat… or via the emergency telephone line. We are working alongside our 3rd party provider to understand the full impact and mitigate this problem,” the company said.
Data from Downdetector showed that 75% of affected users reported server connection failures, while others struggled to load websites or access files. Reports were logged across the U.S., Europe, and Asia, indicating a global-scale disruption.
Among the services hit by the outage were X, Spotify, Canva, Shopify, OpenAI, Garmin, Claude, Verizon, Discord, T-Mobile, AT&T, and online game League of Legends.
Cloudflare, which powers one of the world’s largest distributed DNS and content delivery networks, plays a central role in maintaining internet speed and security. Monday’s outage highlighted how deeply the global digital ecosystem relies on a small number of infrastructure providers.