A significant internet disruption rippled across the UK and beyond on Tuesday, 18 November 2025, as a major outage at network services provider Cloudflare brought down a host of popular websites and applications.
Widespread Disruption for Major Platforms
The technical failure, which began after 11am, had an immediate and far-reaching impact. High-profile services such as the social media platform X, the AI chatbot ChatGPT, and the music streaming giant Spotify were all rendered inaccessible for many users. The popular film review site Letterboxd and multiplayer game League of Legends were also caught up in the chaos, alongside the official Scottish Parliament website.
Users attempting to access affected sites were often met with a message citing an 'internal server error on Cloudflare’s network'. The problem was severe enough that the monitoring site DownDetector, which tracks such outages, was itself impacted. At the peak of the incident, more than 10,000 users reported issues with Cloudflare-related services on DownDetector.
Intermittent Recovery and Ongoing Issues
Cloudflare, which provides critical network and security services for roughly a fifth of all global websites, quickly acknowledged the problem. The company stated it was 'experiencing an internal service degradation' and warned that some services might be intermittently affected.
While some websites came back online temporarily, they often suffered further problems shortly after. In an effort to stabilise the situation, Cloudflare had to temporarily disable some services for UK users. The company later confirmed it had restored its dashboard services but was continuing to work on 'remediating broad application services impact', with customers potentially still seeing higher-than-normal error rates.
Beyond the most prominent names, users also reported difficulties accessing e-commerce platform Shopify, cloud storage service Dropbox, cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase, and the Moody’s credit ratings service.
Expert Analysis on the Fragility of Modern Web Infrastructure
Commenting on the incident, Professor Alan Woodward, a cybersecurity expert at the University of Surrey, highlighted the inherent risk of relying on such centralised services. He noted, 'The downside of being a gatekeeper and distribution network for such big brands is that if this vital system fails, no one can use your service be that website or app.'
Professor Woodward added that the cause appeared to be a 'technical malfunction within the Cloudflare network', which was surprising given that such networks are specifically 'designed to avoid single points of failure'. The exact root cause of the widespread outage remains unclear.
