Cloudflare Global HTTP 500/Human Auth outage DISABLES MILLIONS of websites including X/Twitter, ChatGPT, Claude, Seek, job sites, League, PayPal+more

"Cloudflare blames a software crash after sites like X and ChatGPT went down" https://www.businessinsider.com/cloudflare-outage-internet-down-x-open-ai-2025-11

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Timeline of external MAJOR global IT outage events 2024-2025:

This comes just a month after AWS experienced a huge 14 hour global outage related to misconfigured DNS settings within a global spanning DynamoDB service located within US-EAST-1. Azure also experienced a similar DNS misconfiguration issue a week after AWS. In 2024 Microsoft along with CrowdStrike released a patch that would Blue Screen of Death any Windows PC with the new bad kernel update, brining down airports, banks and any company in between. Is this the new normal? Possibly so, as our capitalistic environment has essentially forced a few big tech players to centralise our web hosting infrastructure. There are some DiFi initiatives such as decentralised DNS or handshake domains. https://www.namecheap.com/blog/exploring-the-idea-of-decentralized-dns/

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ChatGPT summary:

The Cloudflare outage was caused by an oversized configuration file that’s used to manage threat traffic. That file grew beyond what Cloudflare expected, and it triggered a crash in the software system that handles a number of their services. Financial Times+2Reuters+2

Here are some more details:

Cloudflare saw a “spike in unusual traffic” starting around 11:20 UTC, which stressed their systems. Reuters+1
The configuration file in question was automatically generated, and when it got too big, it caused a software crash. Financial Times
Importantly, Cloudflare says there's no evidence the incident was due to a cyberattack or malicious activity. Business Insider+1

--end ChatGPT--

Funnily enough I have also had the same issue happen on a single web server at Siteroo Web running Wordfence which filled up and crashed WordPress on the server when logging all the IP addresses hitting the server. The problem went away by disabling or uninstalling Wordfence and just letting Cloudflare do all the WAF activities.

Got Tweet of the year here (posted during the Cloudflare 2025 outage during a temporary window of uptime lasting just a minute) out of the 2 hour long global outage where X was totally down: https://x.com/stefssite/status/1990766183717691454

https://www.reddit.com/r/CloudFlare/

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1. Cloudflare Just Broke the Internet — X, ChatGPT, Shopify & More DOWN (view original embed)

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Check for updates here: https://www.cloudflarestatus.com/.

And https://www.google.com/search?q=Please+unblock+challenges.cloudflare.com+to+proceed

Live blog: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/live/2025/nov/18/cloudflare-down-internet-outage-latest-live-news-updates

https://apnews.com/article/cloudflare-outage-x-openai-9335e8e0da2a0027d1fbac5eb97d11ae

https://www.reuters.com/business/elon-musks-x-down-thousands-us-users-downdetector-shows-2025-11-18/?utm_source=chatgpt.com

I will do my best to update content below but LinkedIn's editor isn't the best.

Cloudflare said they received a lot of unknown traffic before the incident.

CLOUDFLARE down globally - Major Cyber Attack? (view original embed)

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Major #Cloudflare outage, #X is down. @cloudflare @x should have hired me. (view original embed)

A common error a lot of sites are getting is "Please unblock challenges.cloudflare.com to proceed" due to the way many sites have implemented anti-bot protection including ChatGP, Claude and Tinder, as well as X to name a few. https://www.ynetnews.com/tech-and-digital/article/s1etn19gwl https://www.reddit.com/r/2007scape/comments/1p0a3ej/your_things_arent_broken_cloudflare_is_down_this/

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ChatGPT was not immune to Cloudflare's human auth issue.

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Cloudflare Crash Takes Down Tons of Sites! (view original embed)

A bit of background on me:

Used Cloudflare since 2012, Ironically I received a rejection from Cloudflare about a day ago (Nov 2025) for a TSE role. (There was no phone screen or interview stage). I have gotten to their test stage last year for a Technical Support Engineer (TSE) role, but it was declined even with the help of ChatGPT verifying a take-home test where AI tools were allowed to be used. 🤷♂️ I also attended Cloudflare Connect/Immersive earlier this year in Sydney which was exciting.

Site owners cannot login to Cloudflare's dashboard due to the human auth required, some said they can but it loops back to this page. https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/1p09nye/cloudflare_down_again/

cannot login to #Cloudflare dashboard due to auth bot. (view original embed)

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