On November 18, 2025, Cloudflare experienced a massive outage that lasted for several hours, and no, it wasn’t a cyberattack just a classic technical “oops.” A small permission change in one of Cloudflare’s database systems caused it to generate duplicate entries inside a configuration file used by its bot management system. That file grew to an absurd size and was pushed across Cloudflare’s global network. Unfortunately, the software responsible for handling internet traffic had a hard file size limit. When it tried to load this oversized file, the software simply crashed, triggering a widespread failure and returning HTTP 500 errors to users around the world.
The impact was immediate and massive. Some of the world’s most popular platforms suddenly became unreachable, including X, Discord, LinkedIn, ChatGPT, Gemini, Canva, League of Legends, and Spotify. In other words, work stopped, gaming stopped, content stopped and yes, even music stopped. The outage proved once again that when Cloudflare sneezes, half the internet catches a cold.
Just a few weeks later, on December 5, 2025, Cloudflare managed to do it again this time with a 25-minute outage. Once again, it was not caused by hackers but by a planned mitigation update. During the deployment, a specific change was made to disable an internal WAF testing tool that did not support a new, larger buffer size being rolled out. That one small adjustment was enough to disrupt a significant portion of the global internet. Because apparently, even “planned fixes” like to cause unplanned chaos.
Financially, the November 18 outage was the most damaging. It caused multi-billion-dollar losses, disrupted financial trading systems, and heavily impacted Cloudflare’s market value and trading volume. By the time the December 5 outage happened, investor confidence was already shaky. Cloudflare’s stock dropped by as much as 4.5% in pre-market trading, showing that investors were growing tired of reliability issues turning into global problems.
And this leads to a very uncomfortable but important question if one major service provider goes down for just a few hours and the whole internet starts collapsing, why does the entire digital world depend so heavily on a single company in the first place?
