Why a Cloudflare Outage Can Take Down Half the Internet — Explained

On November 18, 2025, Cloudflare, one of the most widely used internet infrastructure providers, experienced a major outage that caused websites, APIs, and online services around the world to go down. From news sites to SaaS tools, social platforms to government portals, the impact was immediate and widespread.

But why does a failure inside one company affect so much of the global internet? And what does this incident say about the growing dependencies in today’s digital world?

This blog breaks down the outage in simple terms and explains why Cloudflare plays such an outsized role in keeping the modern web online.

What Happened During the Cloudflare Outage?

According to the official coverage by Dawn (source linked below), Cloudflare experienced a technical disruption that led to:

Websites refusing to load
Connection timeouts
500 series server errors
APIs suddenly unreachable
Millions of users losing access simultaneously

Because Cloudflare acts as a “middle layer” between users and websites, any disruption in their infrastructure immediately affects the sites and services relying on it.

How Cloudflare Works (and Why It Matters)

Cloudflare isn’t just a CDN or a security tool, it’s a global network layer that sits between users and most online services.

Cloudflare Provides Several Critical Functions:

1. Content Delivery Network (CDN)

Cloudflare caches website files across hundreds of global data centers.
When a user loads a site, Cloudflare delivers content from the nearest location, reducing latency.

2. DDoS Protection

It filters malicious traffic, protecting websites from attacks that would otherwise make them unreachable.

3. Web Application Firewall (WAF)

Cloudflare blocks suspicious requests before they reach the origin server.

4. DNS Hosting

Cloudflare processes DNS lookups which means if Cloudflare DNS has issues, users may not be able to reach their intended websites.

5. Reverse Proxy Services

Cloudflare sits directly between the user and the website server, inspecting, filtering, and optimizing traffic.

Because of this position, any Cloudflare outage instantly disrupts a large slice of the internet.

Why a Cloudflare Outage Causes So Much Damage

1. Over Centralisation of the Internet

Many organizations rely on Cloudflare for:

DNS
CDN
Security
Load balancing
Zero Trust tunnels
API protection

If Cloudflare experiences a problem, it’s not one site that goes down, it’s thousands.

This creates a single point of failure in an otherwise distributed internet.

2. Cloudflare Has Massive Market Share

Cloudflare is used by:

Fortune 500 companies
SaaS platforms
Online retailers
Banks
Governments
Crypto exchanges
Startups
News organisations
Millions of small websites

Its infrastructure handles a significant percentage of global HTTP traffic.

When it breaks, the web breaks.

3. Cloudflare Sits in the Critical Path

Since Cloudflare is effectively part of the routing path:

User → Cloudflare → Website
If Cloudflare cannot forward traffic, the user never reaches the target site.

Even if a site’s servers are healthy, Cloudflare being down creates an instant global outage.

Did Cloudflare Recover Quickly?

Yes, Cloudflare typically resolves outages fast thanks to:

Global redundancy
Distributed architecture
Massive engineering teams
Automated failover mechanisms

But even short outages (5–15 minutes) can create worldwide disruption, broken user sessions, and downtime for mission critical services.

This incident highlights how deeply integrated Cloudflare is in the internet backbone.

What This Means for the Future of Internet Resilience

The November 2025 Cloudflare outage is another reminder that:

d

1. The Internet Is Becoming More Centralized

A small number of companies now hold enormous influence over global connectivity.

d

2. Organisations Need Better Multi Provider Resilience

Businesses relying solely on Cloudflare (or any single provider) risk global downtime.

d

3. Critical Internet Infrastructure Must Evolve

As more traffic flows through services like Cloudflare, outages become more impactful.

Conclusion

The Cloudflare outage demonstrates a fundamental truth about the modern internet: we rely heavily on a few centralised infrastructure providers, and even a short disruption can ripple across the entire ecosystem.

As organisations build more cloud native services and expose more public APIs, diversification and resilience must remain a priority.

The incident also emphasizes the need for transparency, monitoring, and contingency planning, because the next global outage isn’t a matter of “if,” but “when.”

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Sources

Dawn: Explainer: Why did a Cloudflare outage cause websites to go down?