When Cloudflare sneezes, the Internet catches a cold: Why everything stops working when Cloudflare is down
So much of the Internet runs through Cloudflare that when it stops, sites stop too. From ChatGPT to X, a single layer now controls how we all browse. here's why 'everything' stops when Cloudflare is down
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A Downdetector report on the largest global outages in 2025 ranks AWS, PlayStation, and Cloudflare among the top three largest service outages of the year, based on the number of reports. According to the data, Downdetector received 17 million AWS reports, 3.9 million PlayStation reports, and 3.3 million Cloudflare reports.<br />
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However, the scale of an outage is not only measured by report counts, but by how many services depend on a single provider to function. <br />
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On November 18, 2025, and December 5, 2025, American company Cloudflare experienced downtime, which affected many of the Internet services millions of users worldwide rely on daily, including ChatGPT, Canva, Claude, and X (formerly Twitter). Interestingly, even Downdetector, the site many depend on to know which sites are down, was unavailable due to the Cloudflare issue.<br />
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Following the first downtime, Cloudflare revealed in a statement that the issue originated from an internal server error.<br />
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“The issue was not caused, directly or indirectly, by a cyber attack or malicious activity of any kind. Instead, it was triggered by a change to one of our database systems’ permissions, which caused the database to output multiple entries into a “feature file” used by our Bot Management system. That feature file, in turn, doubled in size. The larger-than-expected feature file was then propagated to all the machines that make up our network,” Mathew Prince, Cloudflare’s Co-founder & CEO, said in a statement. <br />
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While many people experienced the outages, few understand why tools from different companies and industries could all stop working at the same time. The answer lies in how much of the Internet depends on Cloudflare.<br />
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What is Cloudflare?<br />
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Cloudflare is an American company that offers a range of services for website speed and security, including Content Delivery Network (CDN) and other privacy features that protect sites from DDoS attacks and other malicious activities.<br />
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Think of Cloudflare as a middleman. Witho...
