On Tuesday, 18 November, Cloudflare experienced a major service disruption that affected several popular websites, including X, Spotify, PayPal, Canva, and Perplexity. The company attributed the outage to an “internal service degradation,” describing it as a “global network outage” that caused widespread API and dashboard failures.
Cloudflare CTO Dane Knecht explained that a latent bug in a system responsible for bot mitigation triggered crashes following a routine configuration change. This issue cascaded across Cloudflare’s network, causing intermittent failures for numerous services. He emphasized that the outage was not due to any attack. The problem was also reflected on Downdetector, which recorded a spike in complaints and even struggled to load because of the same issue.
Knecht later confirmed on X that the outage had been resolved. He apologized for the disruption, acknowledging the impact on customers and the broader internet. Cloudflare plans to release a detailed breakdown of the incident and is already working on measures to prevent a recurrence, emphasizing transparency and restoring customer trust as top priorities.
