A major internet outage hit on 18 November 2025 when infrastructure provider Cloudflare experienced internal problems that affected many sites in India and around the world. The disruption began early in the day and caused users of platforms such as X (formerly Twitter), ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Canva to face issues loading pages or accessing services. Cloudflare’s network handles a large share of internet traffic, so when its systems faltered the effect was broad and quick. Company engineers say they identified the fault and are working to restore full service.
The outage reportedly started at about 6:40 a.m. ET (around 5:10 p.m. IST). Many users began seeing error-pages or blank screens when visiting known websites. Cloudflare said the root cause was a surge of “unusual traffic” that disrupted its network routing and caused elevated error-rates for some services. Among the affected platforms were X, ChatGPT, Canva, and Perplexity, showing how even widely-used services can suffer when an underlying provider faces trouble. For Indian users, the outage meant delays or failures in social media access, chat-bots, and online design tools.
Cloudflare is a company behind many websites’ backend: it helps with delivering content faster, protecting against attacks, and keeping websites up during heavy usage. Given its role, a failure at Cloudflare ripples out to many services. Because of this event, experts have pointed out the internet’s dependence on a few large providers, which can pose a risk when something goes wrong.
In its public statement the company acknowledged that services were recovering but warned users that error-rates may remain above normal for some time. The exact reason for the traffic surge is still under investigation and there is no indication, for now, that the outage was caused by a cyber-attack.