Is the internet down today?

Cloudflare Outage: How a Hidden Giant Crashed Parts of the Internet Today

Yes. You're not crazy... a lot of error messages today.

A technical disruption at Cloudflare, a core component of the internet's infrastructure, caused a major outage today, leading to widespread access issues for many popular websites and services, including X (formerly Twitter) and ChatGPT. While the company is still investigating the exact cause, early reports (as early as 6:04AM 11.18.25) suggest a spike in unusual traffic to one of its services led to the disruption. This event highlights Cloudflare's critical, though often invisible, role in the modern web.

What is Cloudflare?

Cloudflare is a massive American technology company that provides a suite of web infrastructure and security services. It's often described as one of the biggest companies you've never heard of because its operations occur between a website's server (the origin server where the site physically lives) and the end-user (you).

Cloudflare primarily offers:

• Content Delivery Network (CDN): Cloudflare maintains hundreds of data centers worldwide. It stores (caches) copies of a website's static content—like images, CSS, and some scripts—on these geographically distributed edge servers. When a user requests a site, the CDN serves the content from the server closest to them, dramatically reducing latency and speeding up load times. .

• Web Security and DDoS Mitigation: Cloudflare acts as a reverse proxy that filters incoming traffic. By sitting in front of a website's origin server, it detects and blocks malicious traffic, particularly large-scale Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks that aim to overwhelm a server with fake requests.

• Domain Name Service (DNS): It operates one of the world's highest-performing DNS networks, which is the system that translates human-readable domain names (like example.com) into the numerical IP addresses that computers use to locate servers.

How Does Cloudflare Connect to Websites?

Websites leverage Cloudflare's services by simply pointing their nameservers (part of the DNS record) to Cloudflare's servers.

1. Change of Address: The website owner changes their domain's nameserver settings at their domain registrar (e.g., GoDaddy, Namecheap). Instead of pointing directly to their web host, they point to Cloudflare.

2. Reverse Proxy in Action: Now, when you type a website's address into your browser, your request first goes to a Cloudflare edge server.

3. Security and Caching: This server checks your request for malicious intent (DDoS protection) and checks its local cache for the requested content.

4. Content Delivery:

   • If the content is in the cache (and not expired), Cloudflare immediately sends it to you—making the site load faster.

   • If the content is dynamic or not in the cache, Cloudflare securely forwards the request to the website's original server (the origin), relays the response back, and may cache the new content for future requests.

This setup means every single piece of web traffic for a Cloudflare customer flows through Cloudflare's global network first.

Why Did a Cloudflare Outage Cause a Major Internet Crash?

When Cloudflare experiences a problem, the entire mechanism that routes traffic, filters requests, and delivers content is disrupted for its customers. Because Cloudflare is used by millions of websites—including major platforms like X, ChatGPT, Claude.Ai , and many others—a problem on their end results in a massive, systemic crash for a significant portion of the internet.

The issues reported today, primarily "500 Internal Server Errors," indicate that Cloudflare's own network experienced a failure that prevented it from correctly processing the web requests it receives from users and forwarding them to the destination servers.

In summary, a Cloudflare outage causes a major crash because:

• Centralized Infrastructure Risk: Cloudflare acts as a single point of failure for millions of websites. Even if a website's origin server is perfectly healthy, it doesn't matter; the Cloudflare reverse proxy is blocking the path.

• Failed Security and Routing: Since the traffic routing and security layer is down, users can't connect, resulting in error messages.

• DNS Interruption: While Cloudflare also offers DNS services, the immediate cause appears to be an internal service degradation rather than a total DNS collapse. However, any issue that impacts its core routing mechanism can cause widespread failure due to its central position in the web's architecture.

The company has acknowledged the issue, which began with a "spike in unusual traffic," and is working on implementing fixes and restoring services. 

This event, much like other outages at major infrastructure providers, underscores the fragility and interconnectedness of the modern digital landscape.

I found a video explaining the various security services Cloudflare provides. Cloudflare: A Complete Guide, Features & Walkthrough may help you better understand the many features that make Cloudflare an essential piece of internet infrastructure.

Is the internet down today for you?

AUDIENCE CHECK IN: Are you noticing the outage? Where? When did it start?

Solutions: Don't rely only on internet marketing for 100% of your strategy, and you'll have avenues to reach people when this happens again.

It will happen again. "Is the internet down today?" is trending this year. Write down anything you'll need to remember in case of ... major outage, and it doesn't come back....

The world has had outages before, so... Don't let yourself forget all that you've worked to learn. It's a GREAT time to start a journal again!

God bless + stay strong!

-The Nerd