On November 18, 2025, the internet experienced a significant service disruption when global web infrastructure provider Cloudflare suffered a widespread outage beginning at approximately 11:20 AM UTC. Cloudflare officially stated the root cause was an "unusual spike in traffic" directed toward one of their internal services, which subsequently triggered network errors and elevated the rate of 500 errors for traffic traversing their network. The impact was substantial due to Cloudflare's role in delivering web content, managing DNS, and providing security for a large portion of the internet. Numerous prominent online services and applications, such as OpenAI's ChatGPT, the social media platform X, and the music streaming service Spotify, were rendered inaccessible or experienced severe performance degradation. Cloudflare's own status page and APIs were also initially affected. The company initiated an immediate remediation process, implementing a fix that has led to a recovery of services, with the company monitoring the situation as they finalize efforts to return all error rates to normal pre-incident levels.