Tech giant Cloudflare Inc. (NYSE: NET) found itself at the center of chaos on Tuesday, Nov. 18, when a global outage knocked many of the world’s biggest companies and most used websites offline. OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Shopify, and other major platforms were hit, reminding investors just how central certain enterprises’ networks have become to the functioning of the modern internet.
Unsurprisingly, then, perhaps, the market’s response was brutal. Cloudflare shares dropped nearly 8% on the day, extending a sell-off that began in early November, which had brought the stock down nearly 30% in just a few weeks. After a run that had Cloudflare printing all-time highs in late October, this reversal is particularly painful. But while headlines focused on the outage, the fundamentals tell a different story.
