Did you wake up to a broken internet? On November 18, 2025, popular platforms like X, OpenAI, and countless others suddenly displayed error messages, grinding the web to a halt. This massive digital freeze was triggered by an issue at one of the world’s core internet providers: Cloudflare
This video dives deep into the recent technical troubles that took down significant portions of the web. On November 18, 2025, Cloudflare, a vital internet infrastructure provider, began experiencing problems, leading to a “dramatic spike in problems” reported by monitoring sites. The widespread outage affected hundreds of users and numerous customers, causing downtime on popular websites. Sites like X (formerly Twitter), the film reviewing site Letterboxd, the productivity tool Canva, and even multiplayer games like League of Legends reported issues. Users attempting to access services were met with generic messages, including requests to “Please unblock challenges.cloudflare.com” or the infamous “Internal server error on Cloudflare’s network”. Cloudflare’s essential systems, such as Turnstile (their alternative to CAPTCHA), failed globally, preventing logins and verification on countless websites. Ironically, DownDetector, the service people rely on to track outages, was also unreachable because it uses Cloudflare’s protection. This latest event highlights a growing reliance on centralized infrastructure, as a problem at a single provider like Cloudflare can cause massive ripple effects globally. The sources note that this Cloudflare outage occurred about a month after a similar widespread incident involving Amazon Web Services (AWS) also took much of the internet offline. Both AWS and Cloudflare appeared to be down for hundreds of users around the same time. Cloudflare acknowledged they were “aware of, and investigating an issue which potentially impacts multiple customers,” but initially gave no indication of the cause or fix
The immediate cause and timeline of the Cloudflare outage on November 18, 2025.
• Which major platforms and services—including X, OpenAI, and popular games—were taken offline or heavily impacted.
• How the failure of critical security tools like Cloudflare’s Turnstile led to inaccessible websites and verification challenges.
• The significant impact of centralized internet infrastructure and why single-point failures have massive global consequences
YouTube Tags/Keywords (10-15)
1. Cloudflare down
2. AWS outage
3. Internet infrastructure
4. X not working (or Twitter down)
5. ChatGPT access blocked
6. Cloudflare internal server error
7. Web outage explained
8. Technical problems internet
9. Cloud computing failure
10. DownDetector down
11. Cloudflare Turnstile error
12. Internet centralization
13. League of Legends down
14. Nov 18 2025 outage
15. Tech news breakdown
