If you were online at all in 2025, chances are you felt a Cloudflare wobble, whether it was your favourite app refusing to load, your VPN throwing errors, or your browser begging you to pass yet another Cloudflare challenge. Some days, the internet just stopped behaving. And almost every time, Cloudflare was somewhere in the mix.
Not every incident was an apocalyptic, “the internet is down” moment. Some were messy hiccups, others full-blown outages, and a few were weird, technical chain reactions. But all five reveal just how much of the modern internet quietly runs through Cloudflare’s pipes.
So here’s a quick, conversational walk through the five biggest Cloudflare disruptions of 2025, in reverse order, because of course the most chaotic one came last.
This one you definitely remember. On November 18, social feeds, streaming services, travel portals, government pages, everything from X to ChatGPT to Fortnite, started throwing Cloudflare error screens. It felt like the internet collectively forgot how to internet.
Cloudflare later said the meltdown traced back to a sudden surge of “unusual challenge traffic.” Translation: their network got slammed with a huge spike of verification requests, and things buckled.
For a few hours, the web was unpredictable. Some pages loaded, some refused, and others stuck you in an infinite loop of challenges you could never pass. It was the kind of outage that makes you realise just how many apps depend on Cloudflare without ever mentioning it.
In August, we got a different flavour of chaos. This wasn’t Cloudflare “going down,” but more like Cloudflare and AWS clogging each other’s arteries.
A sudden rush of traffic toward AWS’s us-east-1 region created severe congestion on the links between the two giants. And because so many services use Cloudflare as the delivery layer and AWS as the engine room, the slowdown hit from both sides.
Websites didn’t exactly break – just lagged, stuttered, or times out in the most infuriating way. It was a reminder that the internet is basically a giant group project, and when two of the biggest players get stuck, everyone suffers.
July gave us a shorter, but very weird, incident. Cloudflare’s 1.1.1.1 public DNS service had a routing config error, which caused routes to be withdrawn. If that sounds abstract, the real-world version was simple:
Sites were up. You just couldn’t reach them.
Apps acted broken even though they were perfectly fine. DNS failures are sneaky like that, they make everything look offline from your screen even when the servers are healthy and humming. This one lasted under an hour, but it was enough to send a lot of users (and engineers) spiraling.
June’s incident was messy on the inside. A big chunk of Cloudflare’s own service ecosystem – Workers KV, WARP, Access, Images, Stream, Workers AI, Turnstile, Zaraz, AutoRAG, even parts of the dashboard – suffered outages or serious degradation.
No single cause for global chaos here. Just internal systems failing in ways that trickled down to developers, businesses, creators, and anyone using Cloudflare for things like authentication, serverless logic, or AI inference.
It wasn’t as loud as November’s meltdown, but in terms of services impacted, it was one of the broadest failures of the year.
And finally, the earliest incident of the year: Cloudflare’s R2 object storage went wonky. Error rates climbed, requests failed, and anything relying on R2, like file hosting, media retrieval, or data-heavy apps, started slowing down or stalling.
Not a dramatic outage, but incredibly disruptive if your app expected instant reads or writes. Developers felt this one more than casual users, but it still counts as a key disruption because of how widely R2 is used in modern web infrastructure.
Looking back at 2025, one thing is clear: Cloudflare’s importance and vulnerability is growing. A traffic spike, a routing misconfiguration, a congested link, a product-layer failure, any one of these can ripple across millions of users.
The internet didn’t collapse in 2025, but it definitely had moments where it felt fragile. And Cloudflare was at the centre of that story, five times over.
