Internet on its Knees: Cloudflare Goes Down a Month After AWS. Chronicle of a Black Autumn
Déjà vu: Is the Internet Going Through the "Dark Ages"?
If you have the impression that the digital world has been running on a wing and a prayer in recent weeks, you are unfortunately right. Today, November 18, 2025, the internet held its breath once again, treating millions of users to a forced coffee break (or a sedative tea).
Just 30 days after Amazon Web Services (AWS) shut down half the web due to a DNS error, Cloudflare has joined the infamous "Total Paralysis" club. What we are witnessing today is not just another technical glitch—it is a brutal reminder of how centralized and fragile our digital reality has become.
Flashback: Do You Remember October 20?
Before we analyze today's chaos, let's rewind a month. On the Monday morning of October 20, the US-EAST-1 region belonging to AWS refused to cooperate. Back then, the culprits were the DNS system and the DynamoDB database. The result? Banks, Fortnite, Slack, and even smart vacuum cleaners came to a standstill.
Read more: Detailed analysis of the AWS outage from October 20
At the time, it seemed like a "workplace accident." However, today's events show that the autumn of 2025 is proving exceptionally unlucky for infrastructure giants.
11:20 UTC: H-Hour for Cloudflare
Today's drama began exactly at 11:20 UTC. That was when the systems of Cloudflare—a company that essentially holds the internet together by ensuring security and loading speeds for millions of websites—went haywire.
Monitoring systems recorded a phenomenon described as a "spike in unusual traffic." This was not a standard increase in popularity. It was a digital tsunami that hit the servers with such force that they were unable to process requests. The effect? The mass appearance of the hated HTTP 500 (Internal Server Error).
The company has not yet provided a definitive cause. Two scenarios are being speculated:
- A massive DDoS attack – a brute-force attempt to "clog" the infrastructure.
- An internal/configuration error – a rare convergence of technical events that triggered a snowball effect.
Who Got Hit? The List Is Long
Cloudflare acts as an intermediary (CDN) for a huge portion of the web. The failure of one of its main nodes triggered an immediate domino effect. Within a few hours, Downdetector recorded over 11,000 reports of issues.
The list of victims reads like a "Who's Who" of today's internet:
- Communication and Work: Paralysis affected Zoom (video/audio issues) and Canva (inability to edit projects).
- Artificial Intelligence: Users of ChatGPT and OpenAI services were cut off from their digital assistants.
- Social Media: The X platform (formerly Twitter) made logging in and posting impossible.
- Entertainment and Info: Issues were reported by Spotify, as well as tech sites like The Register, Notebookcheck, Videocardz, and the game Runescape.
Did They Sacrifice London to Save the Network?
An interesting, yet terrifying aspect of today's battle against the outage was the mitigation method. The failure also hit the VPN service—Cloudflare WARP. To offload the infrastructure and allow patches to be deployed, engineers had to make drastic decisions.
In some regions, including London, access to the WARP service was temporarily and intentionally disabled. This strategy resembles cutting power to one district to prevent blowing the transformer for the entire city. Thanks to these "system modifications," they managed to gradually reduce the number of errors and restore traffic, though a bad taste remains.
Centralization: Convenience at a Cost
The Cloudflare outage of November 18, 2025, combined with the AWS incident a month ago, poses difficult questions. We have created an internet that is fast and secure but rests on a few pillars. When one of them cracks—whether due to an attack or human error—the whole roof comes down.
Experts agree: today's chaos is a symbol of a Single Point of Failure. Companies must start thinking seriously about redundancy and provider diversification because relying on one "giga-provider" is becoming a game of Russian roulette.
Cloudflare has promised a detailed post-mortem. We await it impatiently to find out exactly what was behind this "unusual traffic spike." Was it an attempted cyberattack on a global scale? Time will tell.
For now—let's just be glad this text loaded at all.
Sources:
Aleksander
About the Author
Dyrektor ds. Technologii w SecurHub.pl
Doktorant z zakresu neuronauki poznawczej. Psycholog i ekspert IT specjalizujący się w cyberbezpieczeństwie.
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