The internet went dark this morning. A massive Cloudflare outage rippled across the globe, knocking out access to major platforms and sending millions of users into instant confusion.
Sites stalled. Apps froze. Dashboards wouldn’t load. For a moment, half the internet simply vanished.
Cloudflare confirmed the disruption came from an “unusual” surge in traffic that overwhelmed key systems. The spike forced widespread failures across websites and apps that depend on the company’s global network.
It’s the most severe internet outage of the year. And it hit fast.
A Wave of Platforms Collapse at Once
The blackout spread across major platforms like a chain reaction.
Twitter/X went offline.
ChatGPT, including OpenAI’s core services, froze for users across multiple regions.
- Spotify stalled.
- Facebook dropped connections.
- Telegram went silent.
League of Legends players were locked out of their servers.
Letterboxd, news sites, gaming platforms, and financial dashboards all fell in minutes.
Traffic monitors showed a near-vertical spike in error reports. For many users, it looked like their entire digital world suddenly shut off.
This wasn’t a glitch on one app. This was Cloudflare, the backbone of huge parts of the modern internet, failing at scale.
Roughly 30% of the Internet Goes Offline
Cloudflare runs one of the largest edge networks in the world, routing and protecting traffic for millions of domains. When it goes down, the impact is instant and widespread.
Early estimates show the outage disrupted roughly 30% of global internet traffic. That number includes websites, apps, APIs, and services that depend on Cloudflare’s CDN, security layers, and DNS infrastructure.
- For businesses, it became a sudden operational freeze.
- For creators, a shutdown of their digital storefronts.
- For users, a complete blackout of the platforms they rely on every day.
The scale shows just how deeply Cloudflare sits inside the internet’s architecture, and how fragile the system becomes when a single point of failure triggers a cascade.
Crypto Exchanges and Fintech Platforms Hit Hard
This morning’s incident didn’t only affect social media and entertainment apps. Crypto exchanges saw immediate downtime as front-end systems failed to load and API calls timed out.
- Trading apps stalled.
- Price feeds delayed.
- Login pages broke.
- Support sites crashed.
The disruption added volatility to a market already on edge this week. Some exchanges temporarily disabled functions to prevent trade mismatches and liquidation errors.
Cloudflare’s outage came at the worst possible moment for digital asset platforms. Many rely on its DDoS protection and routing services for uptime stability. When the pipeline choked, the entire sector felt the impact.
Cloudflare Blames “Unusual” Traffic Spike
The company released an early statement confirming the outage was triggered by an “unusual spike in traffic.” Cloudflare did not initially classify the incident as an attack, but the wording raised questions.
Internet analysts are already debating whether the blackout stemmed from:
- A massive coordinated DDoS wave
- A routing misconfiguration amplified across global nodes
- A failure inside Cloudflare’s load balancers
- A high-volume traffic surge tied to an ongoing event
Whatever the cause, the load overwhelmed Cloudflare’s systems, triggering failures in routing layers that serve millions of daily requests.
For users, the reason didn’t matter. The result did: the internet broke, and everything went dark.
Cloudflare Stock Drops More Than 5%
As the outage spread, Cloudflare stock ($NET) moved sharply lower. Shares fell more than -5% on the day as investors reacted to the scale of the shutdown.
For a company positioned as a core reliability layer of the web, any sign of instability rattles markets quickly. This year has already seen multiple infrastructure failures across major providers, including two outages from AWS in the past months.
Cloudflare’s incident adds to a widening concern about the fragility of global internet infrastructure. One outage can ripple across hundreds of millions of users in seconds.
Today, it did exactly that.
100 Million+ Users Affected Worldwide
Early estimates suggest more than 100 million users experienced direct disruptions. Many saw blank screens, timeout errors, or endless loading loops. Others were pushed out of logins or met with “service unavailable” notices.
For several services, mobile apps and desktop websites failed simultaneously. Even backend dashboards used by developers and admins crashed, slowing recovery efforts.
This wasn’t a localized event. It was global.
The outage hit Europe, North America, Asia, Africa, and parts of South America. Regions dependent on Cloudflare Lite and Cloudflare DNS saw the earliest signs of recovery, but high-traffic zones remained unstable for hours.
This incident marks the third major backbone outage this year. AWS collapsed twice earlier, disrupting everything from banks to streaming platforms. Now Cloudflare joins the list with the largest single blackout of 2024.
The pattern underscores a growing reality: the internet depends on a small number of infrastructure giants. When one slips, global systems fall.
Cloudflare’s dominance in CDN, security, and routing makes it essential, but also a potential single point of failure. Today’s outage proves how quickly the web can break when a top-tier provider is hit by unexpected traffic.
Social Reactions: Panic, Humor, and a Flood of Reports
As platforms blinked offline, X became the center of conversation once connections partially returned. Users joked about the end of the internet. Others shared screenshots of dead apps, frozen dashboards, and collapsed systems.
Two notable posts shared during the peak of the outage include:
Cloudflare went down early this morning, causing half the internet to go offline.
Major platforms like Twitter/X, ChatGPT (OpenAI), Spotify, Facebook, Telegram, League of Legends, Letterboxd, and others were affected. pic.twitter.com/tNUaGGxNib
— FearBuck (@FearedBuck) November 18, 2025
Both posts captured the shock across the tech world and highlighted the real-time scale of the incident.
Cloudflare says systems are stabilizing, and traffic levels are returning to normal. Engineers are continuing to investigate the root cause.
The company faces pressure to deliver answers quickly. With millions of businesses depending on its infrastructure, clarity is crucial.
For now, today’s outage is a reminder: even the strongest internet giants can fall. And when they do, the world feels it instantly.
Disclosure: This is not trading or investment advice. Always do your research before buying any cryptocurrency or investing in any services.
Follow us on Twitter @nulltxnews to stay updated with the latest Crypto, NFT, AI, Cybersecurity, Distributed Computing, and Metaverse news!
Source: https://nulltx.com/cloudflare-outage-takes-down-30-of-the-internet-in-largest-blackout-of-the-year/