Cloudflare Outage Takes Down X, ChatGPT & Discord

By The InShort News Tech Desk

A massive global outage at internet infrastructure giant Cloudflare has taken down some of the world’s biggest websites and apps on Tuesday morning, including:

X (formerly Twitter)
ChatGPT (chatgpt.com & API)
Discord
Shopify stores
Feedly, Zerodha, Medium, Register.co.uk and many more

The disruption began around 11:20 UTC / 6:20 AM EST / 4:50 PM IST and peaked within minutes, with tens of thousands of error reports flooding Downdetector.

What Users Are Seeing Right Now

X/Twitter: “Something went wrong” + internal server error
ChatGPT: “Please unblock challenges cloudflare.com to proceed”
Many sites: Cloudflare “Error 500 Internal Server Error” or endless verification loops

Official Statement from Cloudflare (Live Updates)

11:45 UTC – “We are observing a spike in unusual traffic… investigating impact.”

12:10 UTC – “Deployed a fix that has restored dashboard and most services.”

12:30 UTC – “Services are recovering but some customers may still see elevated error rates.”

13:15 UTC – Cloudflare confirms full mitigation in progress

Why One Company Can Break 20% of the Internet

Cloudflare protects over 20% of all websites worldwide against DDoS attacks, bots, and hacking attempts. When its edge network fails, millions of sites become unreachable — even if the actual servers are fine.

Cybersecurity expert Alp Toker called it “one of the internet’s largest single points of failure.”

Current Status (Last updated 14:00 UTC)

Most services are recovering rapidly. X, ChatGPT and Discord are loading again for the majority of users. Some regional pockets and individual Shopify stores may still be affected.

Recent Major Internet Outages (2025)

October 2025 – Amazon AWS outage (1,000+ sites down)
Early November 2025 – Microsoft Azure regional failure
Nov 18 2025 – Cloudflare global incident (current)