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One Routine Update, Six Hours of Disruption: What the Cloudflare Outage Really Revealed
If a minor configuration adjustment within one provider can unsettle vast portions of the internet, the problem lies less with the adjustment itself and more with the architecture that allowed it to cascade. That truth became unavoidable on 18 November 2025, when Cloudflare experienced an outage that sent instability across many of the services people and businesses rely on every day. The problem lasted only a few hours, but the implications stretch much further.
How a Routine Update Turned into a Global Incident
The sequence began at 11:05 UTC, when Cloudflare applied a routine database permissions change. Nothing about the update appeared unusual, but it produced a configuration file that was far larger than any system expected. Once that oversized file began to move across Cloudflare’s network at11:20 UTC, some systems processed it without issue while others could not. The result was a patchwork of normal behaviour and outright failure, depending entirely on whether a given region had received the problematic file.
This uneven pattern created early confusion. In some places, everything appeared stable; in others, services were intermittently collapsing. The symptoms initially resembled the kind of distributed, coordinated attack that attempts to overwhelm an infrastructure provider. Only later did it become clear that the cause was entirely internal.
As the file continued to propagate, disruptions spread rapidly to major platforms that depend heavily on Cloudflare for routing and performance. Users saw service degradation across major platforms including ChatGPT, Claude AI, Twitter, Spotify and Canva reported errors or reduced availability during the outage, causing major disruptions to productivity for the workers that rely on those tools.
Stabilisation, Diagnosis and Recovery
Cloudflare implemented temporary workarounds shortly after13:00 UTC to stabilise traffic and limit the disruption. The moment engineers identified the exact source of the problem, a mis-sized configuration file, they replaced it with a correct version at 14:24 UTC. Traffic soon began to flow normally again, and by early evening the company confirmed that all systems had returned to full operation.
In its post-incident analysis, Cloudflare pointed to several contributing factors: outdated assumptions in certain internal queries, a lack of proper validation on automatically generated configuration files and insufficient safeguards within specific proxy components. None of these issues is unheard of in large-scale systems, but the consequences in this case were amplified by the scale and centrality of the service affected.
A Short Outage with Wider Consequences
Across roughly three hours, significant portions of the internet operated unpredictably. Full restoration took nearly six. During this window, organisations experienced stalled workflows, service delays, customer frustrations and a sharp reminder of how deeply their operations rely on cloud services they neither own nor control.
Even when outages are short, the consequences of downtime spread quickly: revenue goes on hold, support queues expand, deadlines slip and trust in digital reliability takes a hit. Much of today’s economy is built on continuous access to cloud-based tools; interruptions of this magnitude ripple far beyond the technical sphere.
The Deeper Issue: A Highly Centralised Internet
The most striking aspect of this incident is not that something went wrong, but how much went wrong because of where it happened. Theoutage did not arise from a sophisticated attack or a volatile newvulnerability. It came from a routine internal update and one that would oncehave created limited disruption but now affects a global landscape due to theinternet’s critical functions being concentrated in the hands of a small numberof providers.
Recent years have seen the majority of online services increasingly reliant on a shrinking number of major infrastructure providers for content delivery, security, domain name resolution and application routing. Cloud flareis one of the few organisations that now support a significant proportion of worldwide traffic. This concentration brings efficiencies and enhanced security, but it also introduces systemic risk. When a single provider experiences an operational failure, the consequences can be widespread.
A Regulatory Perspective That Anticipates This Reality
European frameworks such as DORA and NIS2 are already designed with these kinds of dependencies in mind. They assume that key third-party providers will experience outages and place responsibility on organisations, not providers, to prove that they can continue operating when those outages occur.
For leadership teams, this means resilience is no longer solely a technical concern delegated to IT. It is a governance obligation. Boards and executives are expected to ensure continuity, maintain access to critical data and demonstrate that their organisation’s operations are not vulnerable to the failure of any single external provider.
The Lesson to be Learned
The Cloudflare outage is an example of a much broader trend. Our digital infrastructure has become so centralised and interconnected that internal accidents can now have global consequences. As dependencies deepen, organisations must rethink how they ensure continuity when the infrastructure they rely on lies outside their control.
The question is no longer whether large providers will experience disruption, history shows that they will. The question is whether businesses can remain operational when they do. The organisations that succeed over the coming years will be those that treat digital resilience as a design principle rather than an afterthought, and that recognise that sovereignty over their most critical data and operations is no longer optional.