Tuesday morning, November 18th, wasn’t a great day for the internet.
At 6:20 AM, Cloudflare went down. Hard.
ChatGPT stopped responding. X (formerly Twitter) threw error messages. Spotify went silent. Shopify couldn’t process transactions. Even Downdetector, the site that tracks outages, couldn’t stay online (ironic).
If you tried to access any of these services, you got an Error 500 message and a lot of frustration.
The outage lasted about three hours. Some sites flickered back online, then crashed again. It was chaos.
What Actually Happened
Not a cyberattack. Not hackers. Not even a DDoS assault (though Cloudflare thought it might be at first).
A configuration file grew too big.
Cloudflare was updating database permissions to improve security. The change accidentally caused a file to double in size. That file fed into their Bot Management system, which had a hard limit on how large it could be.
When the oversized file hit that limit, the software panicked. The core system that routes traffic for millions of websites crashed. (One file. Billions of users affected.)
By 9:30 AM, most services were back, but full recovery took until early afternoon.
Why This Matters to Your Business
Cloudflare handles traffic for about 20% of all websites globally. It protects against hackers, speeds up pages, and filters fake traffic.
When it crashes, businesses lose access to critical systems, e-commerce sites can’t process orders, SaaS platforms go dark, and customer support tools freeze. And there’s nothing you can do about it (Because the problem isn’t on your end).
This is what’s called a single point of failure. One service goes down and everything depending on it collapses too.
This Keeps Happening
Amazon Web Services had a major outage last month, Google Cloud crashed in June, and CrowdStrike caused a global meltdown in July 2024 that grounded flights and delayed hospital procedures.
Jacob Bourne, an analyst at EMarketer, said it plainly:
“We’re seeing outages happen more frequently, and they’re taking longer to fix. That’s a symptom of strained infrastructure: increased AI load, streaming demand, and aging capacity all pushing systems past the edge.”
The internet is more centralized than most people realize. A handful of companies handle most web traffic, so when one stumbles, the damage spreads fast.
What You Should Do Now
Map your dependencies.
Know which cloud providers your business relies on and understand what breaks if each one goes down.
Build redundancy.
Multi cloud strategies aren’t just for enterprise anymore. Even small businesses need backup plans.
Test your disaster recovery plan.
Run drills, simulate outages, and make sure your team knows what to do when a critical service fails.
Have a communication plan.
Know how you’ll notify customers during service disruptions. Don’t wait for them to reach out confused.
The Bottom Line
Yesterday’s Cloudflare crash was a reminder.
Cloud services feel reliable until they fail. And when they do, businesses with backup plans keep running while everyone else scrambles.
Your infrastructure is only as reliable as its weakest link. If that link is a single cloud provider handling 20% of global web traffic, you need a Plan B (preferably before the next outage.)
→ Schedule a free assessment ASAP with GiaSpace (now is the time!!) and let’s build resilience into your infrastructure before the next crash.
Published: Nov 19, 2025
