On Monday, November 18, 2025, a significant portion of online services stopped working properly. It wasn’t your computer or your connection: the issue came from Cloudflare, a company that powers a huge part of the infrastructure used by thousands of websites and apps around the world.
An internal configuration file grew larger than expected and ended up blocking a critical section of Cloudflare’s network. This triggered massive errors: pages that wouldn’t load, apps showing failure messages, and entire services down for hours.
The company confirmed it wasn’t an attack, but an internal technical error.
Why did it affect so many people?
Because Cloudflare is one of the core pillars of the Internet. It supports thousands of sites and apps globally and manages essential services like attack protection, traffic optimization, content delivery (CDN), and — most importantly — DNS.
The DNS (Domain Name System) is like a modern version of an old phone book (something you’ve likely never seen if you’re under 25). It translates names like bitskingdom.com into numerical addresses computers can understand.
And since countless services rely on Cloudflare to keep that “directory” working correctly, when the company has a problem, the impact spreads worldwide. Thousands of sites stop loading even if the user’s connection is perfect.
Explained simply
Imagine the Internet as a huge city. Cloudflare would be one of the main highways.
And besides Cloudflare, there are other “highways” operated by backbone carriers — the companies that run the main routes through which most global Internet traffic moves between countries and regions.
If one of those highways gets blocked, it doesn’t matter how many small streets are open: traffic jams and many routes become inaccessible.
That’s exactly what happened.
How did users experience it?
Even if fiber or Wi-Fi was working fine, many users saw:
- Sites that wouldn’t load or returned “500 error.”
- Apps crashing or failing to display information.
- Payment platforms or online stores completely offline.
- A general feeling that “the Internet is broken,” even though the problem was with a global provider.
For anyone who uses the Internet daily — all of us — the impact was immediate.
Can it happen again?
Yes, it can happen again. Not because Cloudflare works poorly, but because no technological system is infallible. Failures can occur due to:
- Configuration errors, like this one.
- Internal software bugs.
- Unexpected traffic spikes.
- Physical infrastructure issues.
- Global routing failures.
- And the worst of all: cyberattacks.
The Internet is designed to be resilient, but not perfect.
Can failures like this be prevented?
Yes and no.
Companies like Cloudflare rely on advanced monitoring systems, redundant services (so one can replace another if something breaks), and contingency plans for unexpected issues. But when a failure happens at an extremely critical point, it’s difficult to predict or fully avoid.
For users and businesses, the best recommendations are:
- Have alternatives when one service stops responding.
- Use more than one provider for critical applications (such as payment systems or online stores), so they can stay operational even if one provider goes down.
- Monitor the status of third-party services your business depends on.
- Understand that the Internet still relies on central infrastructure pieces that, if they fail, can disrupt millions of users.
Conclusion
The Cloudflare outage reminds us that, although the Internet feels massive and decentralized — a network of thousands of servers connected to each other — it still depends on core providers whose failures can impact millions worldwide.
At Bits Kingdom, we believe these events help us better understand how the network works and why it’s so important to design resilient systems that can handle the unexpected.
