ISLAMABAD: Cloudflare on Tuesday suffered disruptions and triggered downtime on popular websites, including Elon Musk’s X, as confirmed by the official Cloudflare Status page and Downdetector.com.
Cloudflare, a key provider of internet infrastructure and website security, suffered a major disruption, causing widespread outages across multiple platforms — including thousands of reports from users of social media site X.
The outage also briefly affected tracking service Down Detector.
There were more than 5,600 reports of issues with the social media platform, as of 06:51 a.m. ET, according to Downdetector, which tracks outages by collating status reports from a number of sources.
Cloudflare, a web infrastructure company, was also having issues that impacted other services. It was not immediately clear whether the outages were related.
Around 6:40 a.m. ET, Cloudflare said on its status page it was investigating the issue. The company’s shares fell 4.1% in premarket trading.
“We are working to understand the full impact and mitigate this problem. More updates to follow shortly,” it said.
X and Cloudflare did not immediately respond to Reuters’ requests for comment.
Users encountered alerts flagging an internal server error on Cloudflare’s network and were asked to try again after a few minutes.
Cybersecurity watchdog NetBlocks confirmed the global nature of the disruption, noting that the incident was not linked to any country-level internet shutdowns or filtering.
ℹ️ Note: A wide range of online services are currently experiencing disruptions due to a technical issue affecting Cloudflare's global network; incident not related to country-level internet disruptions or filtering pic.twitter.com/PvNU0MecMq
— NetBlocks (@netblocks) November 18, 2025
Cloudflare acknowledged the issue in a series of updates, initially reporting “widespread 500 errors”, dashboard and API failures, and what it described as “internal service degradation.”
The company said several services were intermittently impacted as teams worked to restore functionality.
“We are working to understand the full impact and mitigate this problem. More updates to follow shortly,” Cloudflare said in its early statements.
Later, the company reported signs of improvement: “We are seeing services recover, but customers may continue to observe higher-than-normal error rates as we continue remediation efforts.”
Cloudflare said it would continue providing updates as it moved toward full restoration of services.
Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA) stated in a press release that the authority is closely monitoring a major global outage impacting X (Twitter) and Cloudflare.
“PTA is in contact with global platforms and local operators and will continue to observe the situation until services are fully restored,” the authority stated.
