Following widespread outages at AWS and Microsoft’s Azure, Cloudflare has become the latest platform to go offline.
Visitors to major sites including X and Letterboxd were met with a 500 internal error page earlier today, with Data Centre Review also being impacted by the outage. Cloudlfare has yet to detail exactly what caused the outage, although it impacted third-party websites, as well as Cloudflare’s own dashboard and API features.
Cloudflare, which provides internet infrastructure used to keep websites online and mitigate cyber attacks, acknowledged the disruption, although recovered quicker than AWS’ outage earlier this year. “We are seeing services recover, but customers may continue to observe higher-than-normal error rates as we continue remediation efforts,” the company said in an update at 12:21pm. During the writing of this article, the Data Centre Review website has been up and down like a yo-yo.
Ironically, Down Detector, the tracking website that monitors outages, also struggled to load during the incident. When available, it showed a sharp spike in problem reports tied to affected services.
Cloudflare’s technologies sit in front of many popular sites to handle heavy traffic and protect against malicious activity, meaning issues at the provider can ripple across a broad swathe of the internet. The cause of the problem was not immediately clear at the time of writing.
It’s just the latest in a long line of high-profile outages recently. The AWS outage earlier this year was particularly significant given it impacted more than 1,000 of the most visited sites – including Reddit, Amazon itself, Snapchat, and even HMRC in the UK.
Despite the high profile of some of these outages, the Uptime Institute’s 2025 Annual Outage Analysis showed that overall outage frequency and severity are actually declining year-on-year. The problem comes when there is an outage that impacts one of the major hyperscalers – such as AWS or Microsoft’s Azure – with thousands of businesses now reliant on these hyperscalers to remain online, the impact of that outage is widespread.
That means that while the number of outages overall is actually decreasing, the actual ‘blast radius’ of each outage is often larger. It also doesn’t help that many of these outages have been clustered together – after all, AWS went down on October 19, Azure October 29, and now Cloudflare on November 18.
