This Monday, November 18, 2025, shortly after noon, strange error messages and long blank pages invaded the screens of millions of users around the world. In a few minutes, an entire section of the Internet seemed to disappear, affecting social platforms as well as information and entertainment services. The explanation did not take long: a massive outage at Cloudflare, a key company in Internet infrastructure, had just caused global digital chaos.
From X (formerly Twitter) to Feedly, including Marmiton, Doctissimo, OpenAI, ChatGPT and Claude AI, the services affected were numerous. Even Les Numériques, Downdetector – although a reference tool for monitoring outages live – suffered a failure. The cause is a technical problem of unprecedented magnitude in Cloudflare’s networks, which alone ensures security, content distribution and protection against cyberattacks for nearly 20% of the global Web.
Cloudflare, this invisible giant on which a large part of the Internet relies
Little known to the general public, Cloudflare is nevertheless omnipresent. Its role is to make navigation on millions of sites around the world smoother and more secure. It acts as a bridge between Internet users and platforms, speeding up page loading while filtering attacks, including the dreaded DDoS attacks. When a player of this magnitude falls, the repercussions are immediate and dramatic.
In a press release sent in the afternoon to Tech&Co, the American company specified: “We are investigating an issue affecting our support portal provider”. Cloudflare also mentions another potential cause: “This would be linked to a service interruption affecting X”. Finally, engineers also report “massive human verification issues” on several sites integrating their security systems.
A digital shock wave revealing our dependence
This incident is a reminder of the extent to which the architecture of the modern Internet relies on a handful of technological players. When one of them encounters a malfunction, even temporary, the entire ecosystem falters. This Monday, users were not simply deprived of social networks or news platforms: the outage affected work tools, administrative sites, notification systems and even critical infrastructures dependent on cloud services.
For many industry observers, this massive outage once again raises the question of the resilience of the Internet and the lack of redundancy in certain technical chains. As large-scale outages have increased in recent years, the reliability of services like Cloudflare has become more strategic than ever.