By skyforbes 
The Digital Backbone Stumbles.
If you tried to send a tweet, ask ChatGPT a question, or log into your work dashboard this afternoon and were met with a cryptic error page, you weren’t alone. For a few tense hours, a significant portion of the modern web went on an unplanned hiatus. The culprit? A major service degradation at Cloudflare.
This wasn’t just a minor blip. It was a stark reminder of how much of our digital lives are powered by a handful of critical, behind-the-scenes infrastructure companies.
The Digital Backbone Stumbles
For those who create, share, and work online—Medium writers drafting their next story, YouTubers uploading edits, researchers accessing cloud data, remote workers joining video calls—the outage was more than an inconvenience; it was a hard stop. Projects were frozen, deadlines were threatened, and that precious flow state was abruptly interrupted.
The incident began on November 18, 2025, at approximately 11:48 UTC, when Cloudflare announced it was “experiencing an internal service degradation.” What followed was a rolling series of updates that millions of users were feeling in real-time.
From Cloudflare’s own status page, we saw the narrative of a technical struggle unfold: