• MakeUseOf – This Cloudflare outage has forced half the internet offline
• Bloomberg [no paywall] – Why Today’s Internet Is So Fragile – For much of the world, there is no longer any such thing as being offline. The internet underpins the global financial and consumer ecosystem, enabling instant communication and transactions. While the system is integral to so much human activity, it’s also fragile, costing billions of dollars and creating huge inconvenience when part of it stops working. Widespread blackouts have been happening on a regular basis in 2025; technical glitches at major web infrastructure providers have brought down services for millions of users. One 15-hour outage at Amazon.com Inc. data centers in October locked UK kids out of gaming platform Roblox, stopped workers from making Zoom calls and forced on-call engineers in India to cancel plans for the Diwali religious holiday. In mid-November, a malfunction at web security firm Cloudflare Inc. took down a swathe of sites including ChatGPT, the New Jersey transit authority and social-media platform X.
• The Verge [November 18, 2025, 8.29 am]: Sites across the web aren’t loading, with some displaying an error message saying, ‘Please unblock challenges.cloudflare.com to proceed.’ Cloudflare, a networking company that provides DDoS protection and delivery services for many companies around the globe, is experiencing a major outage that’s taking down sites across the web. Users are running into an error message when they try to access X, ChatGPT, and even the outage-tracking website DownDetector has an error message saying “Please unblock challenges.cloudflare.com to proceed.” On Cloudflare’s status page, the company’s latest note about the outage and its attempt to recover services says:

We have made changes that have allowed Cloudflare Access and WARP to recover. Error levels for Access and WARP users have returned to pre-incident rates.

We have re-enabled WARP access in London.

We are continuing to work towards restoring other services.

The outage comes less than a month after a huge Amazon Web Services crash took down Fortnite, Alexa, Snapchat, and other services, which was followed by issues at Microsoft Azure that brought Xbox offline for hours…”