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​What is Cloudflare and why is it impacting so many websites on the internet

etimes.in | Last updated on - Nov 18, 2025, 20:04 IST
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​What is Cloudflare and why is it impacting so many websites on the internet

Cloudflare is a cornerstone of modern internet infrastructure or a collection of many parts of the internet. It is a company that many people may not even notice, but whose impact is felt every time they visit a website. Today thousands of users have faced a Cloudflare outage, which made users only question, “Why is this not working” while they tried opening a webpage.

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Cloudflare outage causes chaos online

Today thousands of users have faced a Cloudflare outage on the internet, after visiting many operational websites of popular platforms like, ChatGPT, Twitter, Canva, Shopify and many more and it became a trending topic of discussion online, where many people started searching about the reason behind the outage of the platform and the knowhow behind it.

It provides services that make websites faster, safer, and more reliable by protecting them from cyberattacks, spreading content efficiently across the globe, and acting as a shield between web hosts and malicious users.

However, because so many sites trust Cloudflare for these critical functions, problems at Cloudflare itself can create ripple effects. When its systems go down or misbehave, large parts of the internet feel the shock.

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What is Cloudflare

Cloudflare is a technology company that provides a range of internet infrastructure services. At its core, it offers a global network (a CDN) that speeds up websites by caching content closer to users, and acts as a reverse proxy to handle, filter, and route traffic. It also provides security solutions like DDoS protection, web application firewalls, and SSL/TLS encryption to shield websites from attacks.

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Why so many websites depend on it

Many website operators choose Cloudflare because it solves critical problems cheaply and at scale. It makes websites faster globally by distributing content across hundreds of data centres. It also offers strong protection against traffic surges and malicious attacks, absorbing potentially harmful traffic before it reaches the origin servers. Moreover, its edge-computing platform enables developers to run code close to users, improving performance.

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Cloudflare responds to the issue

The website issued a statement writing, “Cloudflare is aware of, and investigating an issue which potentially impacts multiple customers,” the company said in a new update. “Further detail will be provided as more information becomes available.”
Tracking website Down Detector, which monitors outages, was also hit by the technical problems itself. But when it loaded it showed a dramatic spike in problems.
Affected users saw a message indicating there was an “internal server error on Cloudflare’s network”. It asked users to “please try again in a few minutes”.

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Why is Cloudflare not working and when will it be restored

Cloudflare’s outage has now stretched beyond two hours, and major platforms like ChatGPT, X, and even Down Detector are still affected. There’s still no clear timeline for when services will fully recover.

Cloudflare hasn’t offered any estimate on how long fixes might take, and at one point even suggested the issue had been resolved when it actually wasn’t. For now, the company has only said “Investigating - Cloudflare is experiencing an internal service degradation. Some services may be intermittently impacted. We are focused on restoring service..”

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Copyright © May 24, 2026, 01.32PM IST Bennett, Coleman & Co. Ltd. All rights reserved. For reprint rights: Times Syndication Service