Person’s handing hold an iPhone displaying a Cloudflare Error while attempting to access a webpage, during an outage of the Cloudflare service, Lafayette, California, November 18, 2025.
Smith Collection/gado | Archive Photos | Getty Images
Internet infrastructure company Cloudflare was hit by an outage on Tuesday, knocking several major websites offline for global users.
Many sites came back online within a few hours. In an update to its status page around 9:57 a.m. ET, Cloudflare said it had implemented a fix to resolve the issues, though it noted some users may still experience issues accessing its online dashboard.
“We are continuing to monitor for errors to ensure all services are back to normal,” the company added.
E-commerce platform Shopify, job search engine Indeed, Anthropic’s Claude chatbot, President Donald Trump’s Truth Social and Elon Musk’s social media platform X were among the sites impacted by the Cloudflare issues, according to Downdetector, which itself could not be accessed briefly for some users. Some of NJ Transit’s digital services were brought down by the outage.
OpenAI’s status page indicated ChatGPT and its Sora short-form video app were recovering after experiencing issues due to a “third-party service provider.”
A Cloudflare spokesperson said the company observed a “spike in unusual traffic” to one of its services around 6:20 a.m. ET, causing some traffic passing through its network to experience errors.
“We do not yet know the cause of the spike in unusual traffic,” the spokesperson added. “We are all hands on deck to make sure all traffic is served without errors.”
Cloudflare’s software is used by many businesses worldwide, helping to manage and secure traffic for about 20% of the web. Among the services it provides are that it guards against distributed denial of service attacks, which are when malicious actors attempt to overload a website’s system with so many traffic requests that it can’t function.
Shares of Cloudflare slid more than 3%.
The issue comes less than a month after Amazon Web Services suffered a daylong disruption that took down numerous online services, followed by a global outage of Microsoft‘s Azure cloud and 365 services.
In July 2024, a faulty software upgrade by cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike caused a widespread outage that temporarily halted flights, impacted financial services and pushed hospitals to delay procedures.
