According to a Downdetector report detailing the largest global outages in 2025, American company Cloudflare, along with AWS and PlayStation, ranked among the top three service outages of the year based on the volume of user reports. Downdetector received 17 million reports for AWS, 3.9 million for PlayStation, and 3.3 million for Cloudflare. However, the true scale of an outage, particularly for a provider like Cloudflare, is not merely measured by report counts but by the vast number of services that depend on a single provider to function.

Cloudflare experienced significant downtime on November 18, 2025, and again on December 5, 2025. These incidents impacted numerous internet services that millions of users worldwide rely on daily, including prominent platforms such as ChatGPT, Canva, Claude, and X (formerly Twitter). Strikingly, even Downdetector itself, a site users turn to for outage information, became unavailable during the Cloudflare issue. Following the initial downtime, Cloudflare’s Co-founder & CEO, Mathew Prince, issued a statement attributing the problem to an internal server error. He clarified that the issue was not a cyberattack or malicious activity but rather a change to one of their database systems' permissions. This change caused the database to output multiple entries into a "feature file" used by their Bot Management system, resulting in the file doubling in size. This larger-than-expected feature file was then propagated across Cloudflare's entire network, triggering the widespread disruption.

Many users who experienced these outages may not fully grasp why tools from various companies and industries ceased working simultaneously. The explanation lies in the extensive dependence of the internet on Cloudflare's infrastructure. Cloudflare, founded in 2009, is an American company that provides a comprehensive suite of services aimed at enhancing website speed and security. These services include a Content Delivery Network (CDN) and various privacy features designed to protect websites from threats like DDoS attacks and other malicious activities.

Functioning as an essential "middleman," Cloudflare routes every user's request through its global network of data centers, strategically located in 330 cities worldwide. When a user sends a request to a website, instead of directly hitting the website’s server, the request first passes through one of Cloudflare's closest data centers. This process ensures faster content delivery, as the content is served from the geographically nearest server. Furthermore, this intermediary role allows websites to maintain functionality even under heavy traffic loads by distributing the incoming requests. Crucially, Cloudflare also acts as a protective barrier, blocking harmful traffic and malicious attacks before they ever reach the website's original servers. These services are vital for websites, as they eliminate the need for individual installations of speed and security tools, allowing them to simply plug into Cloudflare’s infrastructure. It's important to note that Cloudflare generally does not host the actual data or applications for most websites; companies like OpenAI, Meta, or X typically manage their own servers or utilize cloud providers such as Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, or Microsoft Azure. Cloudflare instead operates as a critical layer in front of these services, managing and optimizing traffic before it reaches the website itself.

During a Cloudflare downtime event, the problem doesn't originate with the individual services like ChatGPT, Canva, or X. Their servers are not failing, nor are they under direct attack. Instead, the shared infrastructure layer that these platforms rely on to deliver content to their users temporarily breaks down. Because Cloudflare sits strategically between users and a vast number of websites, its downtime means that user requests cannot reach their intended destinations, manifesting to users as a widespread failure across seemingly unrelated platforms.

Cloudflare's widespread adoption is largely practical. It handles internet requests for millions of websites and claims to serve an average of 81 million HTTP requests per second. While it has competitors like Akamai and Amazon CloudFront, Cloudflare's appeal stems from its ease of setup, often requiring only a simple change in DNS settings. This offers immediate improvements in website speed and security without the need for organizations to build complex infrastructure in-house. Cost-effectiveness is another significant factor, with Cloudflare providing free and low-cost plans that are highly attractive to startups, media organizations, and small businesses. Even large enterprises leverage Cloudflare to offload traffic and bolster protection against attacks. Over time, this combination of convenience and affordability has solidified Cloudflare's position as a default choice for millions of websites globally. However, this inevitably means that when Cloudflare experiences a fault, as it recently did, a significant portion of the internet is likely to experience disruptions until its services are restored.

The extensive dependency of numerous websites on a single infrastructure layer like Cloudflare amplifies the impact of any failure. A singular outage does not merely affect one company or service; it simultaneously impacts many. When Cloudflare, a provider handling traffic for such a diverse range of platforms, experiences downtime, it can create the impression that the entire internet is broken. To mitigate such risks, some organizations implement strategies such as using multiple CDNs or developing robust fallback systems. While these approaches undeniably enhance resilience, they often come with higher costs and demand greater technical expertise, making them less accessible for smaller organizations and websites. Although Cloudflare outages are rare occurrences, their impact serves as a stark reminder of how reliant the modern internet is on a select few major infrastructure providers. While the complete elimination of outages is improbable, it is crucial to continuously assess and improve the internet's preparedness to absorb such disruptions without succumbing to total system failures.