Cloudflare has restored services following a global outage and released a post-incident report explaining the cause of the disruption. The company said the event began early on November 18th when a misconfigured file within its Bot Management system caused failures across multiple internal components. Traffic routing processes were affected as the oversized configuration file propagated through systems that were not designed to handle it. Cloudflare confirmed that a cyberattack did not cause the incident. The company’s chief executive, Matthew Prince, issued a public apology and said the organisation is reviewing procedures to prevent similar failures.
According to the company, the problem originated from a change to database permissions that produced a configuration file far larger than expected. When this file was distributed across the network, it triggered software crashes that affected routing functions. Services that depend on Cloudflare for content delivery, DNS resolution, and network protection experienced intermittent failures or became unreachable. Platforms such as ChatGPT, X, Spotify, and outage-monitoring sites were among those affected because they rely on Cloudflare’s global infrastructure. The issue persisted for several hours while engineers worked to isolate the cause and roll back the problematic configuration.
Cloudflare said the outage represented its most significant service disruption since 2019. The company posted regular updates as systems were restored and noted that some performance inconsistencies might continue during the recovery period. Engineers introduced a fix, and monitoring tools indicated that network conditions stabilised later the same day. Cloudflare added that it will continue to analyse system logs and routing patterns to verify that operations have returned to normal.
The incident highlights the significant impact that a small number of large network service providers have on the availability of online services. Cloudflare handles large volumes of global traffic and provides essential functions for businesses, government entities, and digital platforms. When a failure occurs within its infrastructure, the effects can spread widely because so many organisations route data through the same core systems. Analysts say the outage reinforces the importance of building resilience into internet infrastructure and diversifying critical services when possible.
Cloudflare outlined several follow-up steps in its report. These include reviewing how configuration files are processed, improving safeguards that detect abnormal file sizes, creating global mechanisms to halt propagation of faulty updates, and strengthening the resilience of components that support high-volume routing. The company said this work is ongoing and that further updates will be published as improvements are implemented.
Organisations that experienced downtime during the outage are assessing the impact on customer services and internal operations. Industry specialists advise companies to evaluate business continuity plans, especially if they rely heavily on a single provider for traffic routing or content delivery. Approaches such as multi-vendor deployment or fallback routing can help maintain service availability when a provider experiences a widespread failure.