Cloudflare has confirmed that a bug in one of its core services caused a major outage on Tuesday, taking large portions of the internet offline and affecting traffic to services including X, ChatGPT, and, ironically, Downdetector. The company’s CTO, Dane Knecht, posted a public apology shortly after services were restored, calling the incident "unacceptable" and attributing the disruption to a routine configuration change that triggered a crash in its bot mitigation layer.
The incident began at approximately 11:48 UTC on November 18, with Cloudflare's official status site acknowledging “internal service degradation”. As the issue spread, users across several regions reported failures to access not only Cloudflare-backed websites but also its Access and WARP services. The company later identified a specific dependency in its bot defense tooling as the source of the problem.
