In the news… Cloudflare Outage

In the news… Cloudflare Outage Hits the Internet

This morning (November 18, 2025), a major Cloudflare service degradation caused widespread outages across the internet, with millions of users encountering the confusing message “Please unblock challenges.cloudflare.com to proceed.”

The issue was not a user-side ad-blocker or VPN problem – it was Cloudflare’s own security challenge system failing globally, triggering HTTP 500 errors and blocking access to sites that rely on Cloudflare for DDoS protection, CDN, and bot management.

Who felt it?

High-profile services affected included:

  • OpenAI / ChatGPT (corporate site and partial API issues) – OpenAI Status
  • X (formerly Twitter) – widespread loading failures
  • Discord, Canva, Spotify, Crunchyroll, and many online games (e.g., League of Legends)
  • Even Downdetector (the outage-tracking site) was temporarily unreachable – irony at its finest

Cloudflare powers security and performance for roughly 20 % of all websites worldwide, so when its challenge/turnstile system breaks, the ripple effect is immediate and global.

Timeline (UTC)

  • ~11:48 UTC – Cloudflare first acknowledges “internal service degradation” and widespread 500 errors – Cloudflare Status Page
  • ~12:03 UTC – Investigation ongoing; support portal also impacted
  • ~13:09 UTC – Issue identified, fix deployed; Access and WARP services recover first
  • ~13:13 UTC – Error rates return to normal for most customers; lingering intermittent issues resolved over the next hour
  • ~13:54 UTC – Although reported clear, still observing the error on my personal machine when visiting the ChatGPT website
  • ~15:07 UTC – I no longer experience the error when visiting ChatGPT.

Full incident report expected from Cloudflare in the coming days (they’re usually very transparent).

Reports on what actually happened

The visible symptom was the “unblock challenges.cloudflare.com” page – normally shown when Cloudflare suspects a browser is blocking its anti-bot JavaScript. When Cloudflare’s own backend couldn’t serve those challenges, every protected site displayed the same misleading message, even though nothing was blocked on the user end.

Why this matters for food, grocery, and supply-chain operators

Many industry platforms quietly rely on Cloudflare:

  • Restaurant ordering & loyalty portals
  • Grocery e-commerce front-ends
  • Supplier login dashboards and EDI gateways
  • IoT telemetry dashboards for cold-chain monitoring

When Cloudflare hiccups, customers can’t place orders, staff can’t clock in, and real-time temperature alerts may stall. Today’s event was short (~90 minutes peak disruption), but it’s another reminder that even “edge” dependencies belong on your critical-path map.

Quick resilience checklist (add these if you haven’t already)

  1. Know which vendors sit behind Cloudflare (check their status pages).
  2. Enable fallback DNS or secondary CDN paths for public-facing sites.
  3. Cache static assets aggressively and set long TTLs for emergencies.
  4. Have an “offline mode” plan for customer portals (read-only menus, phone orders, etc.).
  5. Subscribe to cloudflarestatus.com notifications – they’re fast and public.

Bottom line: the internet had a brief but global sneezing fit this morning, and Cloudflare was the tissue that went missing. Services are now fully restored, but incidents like this keep happening with alarming regularity.

Stay vigilant – the next one is always just around the corner.

Recent articles on various service outages:

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