By skyforbes 
Cloudflare outage cuts access to X, ChatGPT and other web platforms
On November 18, 2025, the internet experienced a moment of brittle fragility. A major infrastructure provider, Cloudflare – which routes, protects and accelerates a large percentage of the world’s web traffic – suffered a significant outage. Many high-profile platforms such as ChatGPT (via OpenAI), X (formerly Twitter), and many others experienced slowdowns, 5xx errors or complete unavailability.
This incident is a wake-up call: Behind the sleek websites and apps we use every day lies a small number of critical infrastructure services. When one fails, the ripple effect is huge.
What went wrong
1. The chain of dependency
Cloudflare provides services such as CDN (content delivery), DDoS mitigation, reverse proxying, and edge routing for thousands of websites.
Many platforms depend on Cloudflare’s network to route traffic, authenticate access, serve APIs, deliver dynamic content. When that layer struggles, everything above it is at risk.
2. The trigger: configuration & module failure
Cloudflare’s published post-mortem describes how a module in their “Bot Management” system (used to evaluate whether traffic is automated or not) depended on a “feature configuration file” which had grown beyond expected size because of duplicate feature rows in the generation system.
That oversized file caused the core proxy service to crash (or degrade) under load, triggering widespread 5xx errors (server-side error responses) and…