On 18 November 2025, Cloudflare — one of the largest internet infrastructure providers in the world — experienced a major global outage. The impact was huge. Websites, apps and online services across the globe suddenly became unreachable, including big platforms such as X (Twitter), ChatGPT, Canva, online retailers and thousands of everyday business websites.
If your website went down today, this is why.
Around midday (UK time), Cloudflare confirmed they were experiencing a serious network-wide issue. Error rates spiked across their edge network, causing:
Websites not loading at all
DNS lookups failing
“500” and “Gateway” errors
Slow or stalled page loads
Loss of access to the Cloudflare dashboard
Because Cloudflare sits in front of a large portion of the internet — handling DNS, CDN, security and routing — the outage created a domino effect. Even sites hosted on completely healthy servers became inaccessible simply because Cloudflare was the entry point.
Cloudflare issued updates throughout the afternoon stating they had identified the problem and were working on restoration. Services began recovering, but there were still pockets of instability for several hours.
Many businesses use Cloudflare to handle:
DNS
CDN caching
Website security (WAF)
SSL
Routing
DDoS protection
If Cloudflare goes down, it becomes a “single point of failure”. Your actual hosting (e.g. Cloudways, AWS, etc.) may still be online, but users can’t reach it.
It’s like having a working shop… behind a locked door.
As today proved, sometimes nothing is wrong with your site — Cloudflare itself was down.
Cloudflare’s status page shows real-time updates when issues occur.
If Cloudflare is down and you have your server’s IP address, you can temporarily route around Cloudflare by:
Changing A records to point directly to your hosting
Turning off Cloudflare’s proxying (if the dashboard is accessible)
Creating an emergency “origin.yoursite.com” record
This bypasses Cloudflare and restores site access — without waiting for Cloudflare to recover.
Today highlighted a major truth: relying on a single DNS provider leaves your website vulnerable.
A more resilient setup uses:
Cloudflare as the main DNS
DNS Made Easy or Route53 as a secondary DNS provider
Automatic failover: if Cloudflare fails, DNS falls back to the secondary provider
This keeps your website live even if Cloudflare goes offline again.
Many people today realised they couldn’t access:
Cloudflare
Cloudways (and other hosting platforms)
Their server panel
Their DNS dashboard
That meant they couldn’t reach the one thing they needed most:
the public IP address of their server.
Keep these details stored somewhere safe and independent of your hosting.
If your business relies heavily on its website, consider:
A status page hosted outside Cloudflare
Uptime monitoring (e.g. UptimeRobot, Better Stack)
Automatic alerts when your site goes offline
An emergency plan for outages
This helps you respond faster (and calm stakeholders more effectively).
Cloudflare is normally extremely reliable — but no provider is perfect. This incident is a reminder that:
The internet is deeply interconnected
Single points of failure cause widespread disruption
Businesses need contingencies, not just hosting
Most importantly, it proves that redundancy isn’t a luxury — it’s essential.
If today caused disruption for your site, or you couldn’t access Cloudflare or Cloudways to fix things, we can help you set up:
Multi-DNS failover (Cloudflare + DNS Made Easy / Route53)
Direct-to-origin emergency routing
Uptime and monitoring tools
A disaster-recovery plan
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