Here We Go Again: Critical Cloudflare Network Issue Triggers Global Disruption

Large sections of the internet are facing disruptions following a confirmed global network issue at Cloudflare, the infrastructure giant that quietly powers millions of sites and digital services worldwide, and the company formally acknowledged the issue.

Specifically, amid a wave of reports of non-working websites, Cloudflare posted an advisory stating that it was investigating a network issue that “potentially impacts multiple customers,” with more details to follow as the situation develops, the company said at 11:48 UTC on November 18.

Cloudflare, which handles millions of internet requests and an estimated 78 million HTTP requests per second, powers traffic for thousands of major platforms. As a result, even partial outages can generate noticeable ripple effects across services, apps, and websites.

Early reports surfaced on social media from users experiencing slow loading, connection failures, and API errors, while outage-tracking platforms, including DownDetector, displayed intermittent visibility issues of their own, further suggesting upstream dependency.

Latest Status From Cloudflare: Issue Identified, Partial Recovery Underway

After the acknowledgment, Cloudflare kept the public informed on its recovery process, including that it had disabled WARP access in London, referring to the service that encrypts and tunnels all internet traffic from users’ devices through Cloudflare’s network, effectively cutting off all London-based users accessing the internet this way.

Following the announcement that its engineers have identified the issue and were implementing a fix at 13:09 UTC, although the service restoration is coming in gradual phases, and not all features are back online at full capacity. Cloudflare’s latest update reads that:

“We have made changes that have allowed Cloudflare Access and WARP to recover. Error levels for Access and WARP users have returned to pre-incident rates. We have re-enabled WARP access in London. We are continuing to work towards restoring other services.”

Meanwhile, the incident revives an ongoing discussion about global internet resilience and dependency on centralized infrastructure providers. Prior outages, including a major disruption earlier this year, highlighted the fragility of a digital ecosystem where the failure of a single backbone provider can impact thousands of unrelated services simultaneously.

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