A major outage at Cloudflare this morning knocked a broad slice of the internet offline. The incident disrupted services for many notable platforms, including Canva, which this author independently verified earlier today. Cloudflare’s own status page recorded a spike in “unusual traffic” around 11:20 UTC that led to widespread HTTP 500 errors across parts of its global network.
The blast radius was global and cut across consumer apps, business tools, and even transport and payments infrastructure. TechRadar’s liveblog lists X, OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Spotify, Discord, Canva, Perplexity, and multiple gaming titles among the affected services. That aligns with our experience, and it calls to mind the recent AWS outage that affected so many sites.
In practical terms, that means users across multiple continents simultaneously saw internal server errors, Cloudflare-branded error pages, or stalled loading screens on social networks, AI tools, media platforms, financial services, and enterprise SaaS. This was a broad internet infrastructure incident. It reached beyond teh scope of a niche app outage.
The scale traces directly to Cloudflare’s role in the modern web stack. Cloudflare is no longer just a content delivery network; it now provides DNS, DDoS mitigation, web application firewalling, bot filtering, CAPTCHAs and Turnstile challenges, zero trust access, and VPN replacement through services like WARP. That consolidated edge fabric sits in front of millions of origin servers and APIs.
In its incident update, Cloudflare describes "a spike in unusual traffic to one of Cloudflare’s services beginning at 11:20 UTC" that led to errors for some traffic traversing parts of its network TechRadar and others report that this manifested as widespread HTTP 500 responses affecting both customer traffic and Cloudflare’s own management interfaces. At the time of writing, Cloudflare has not published a full root cause analysis, so the nature of that "unusual traffic" remains an open question.
The reason this incident reached so many organizations is simple: a large number of companies have moved core functions to Cloudflare’s edge. For many websites and APIs, every single request flows through Cloudflare for DNS resolution, TLS termination, caching, and security checks. That centralization brings huge performance and security advantages, but it also means that any serious issue in Cloudflare’s control plane or data path can interrupt traffic for thousands of independent businesses at once.
This pattern is not unique to Cloudflare. This AP story explicitly connects today’s issues to recent outages at Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services, some of which were caused by configuration changes rather than attacks. Together these incidents show how much of the world’s application delivery now runs through a small number of hyperscale providers and edge networks.
There are a few key cybersecurity takeaways from this story. These go beyond learning cybersecurity for new job opportunities. These are immediate options, things your team can impliment today to help minimize the impacts of these outages in the future. I'll outline them here:
1. Map how deeply you depend on Cloudflare and similar providers
Security teams should maintain a clear inventory of every place Cloudflare sits in the path between users and applications. That includes public websites, customer portals, internal dashboards, APIs, identity flows, and vendor tools that your business relies on. The same mapping should be done for other edge and cloud providers. Without this view, it is difficult to even estimate the impact of an outage in real time.
2. Build and rehearse an “edge provider outage” playbook
Many incident response plans assume the problem lives inside the organization. Teams need a separate, tested playbook for situations where the failure comes from an external platform such as Cloudflare. That playbook should define:
- Who owns initial triage and communication with the provider
- What criteria justify temporary policy changes or bypass routes
- How to communicate with customers and executives when the root cause is outside your direct control
Tabletop exercises that simulate a Cloudflare-scale outage will reveal missing monitoring, DNS limitations, and organizational confusion long before the next real event.
3. Design safe bypass paths before an outage occurs
Some services are so critical that extended downtime is unacceptable. For those, organizations should engineer fallback options in advance rather than improvising under time pressure. Examples include:
- Secondary DNS that can temporarily point traffic directly to origin servers if Cloudflare’s edge cannot handle requests.
- A minimal alternate CDN or regional edge provider that can serve a subset of traffic, even with reduced features.
- Internal access paths for employees that do not depend entirely on Cloudflare zero-trust components.
These bypass paths still need basic access controls and logging, or they simply trade availability problems for new security exposures.
4. Improve external monitoring and vendor awareness
During the outage, some teams initially suspected their own applications until they noticed multiple unrelated sites failing in exactly the same way. Synthetic monitoring from independent networks, combined with alerts on vendor status pages and third-party outage timelines, can shorten that discovery phase. This kind of visibility helps responders decide early whether they are dealing with an internal regression or a platform-wide infrastructure problem.
5. Reevaluate concentration risk as a security issue, not only an uptime issue
Enterprises will continue to rely on Cloudflare, Azure, AWS, and similar providers. The economic and operational benefits are real. At the same time, security leaders should treat concentration risk at these layers as a core part of cyber strategy. That means identifying which functions require genuine multi-vendor redundancy, which systems can tolerate occasional outages, and where additional investment in isolation and resilience is justified.
The Cloudflare outage of November 18, 2025 will eventually have a detailed technical post-mortem. For security and infrastructure teams, the more important work starts now: treating shared edge and cloud platforms as critical dependencies that require explicit design for failure, not just trust that they will stay green on the status page.
Those already well-versed in these skill should have infrastructure or cybersecurity certifications on their resumes. As we build an interconnected world, those who can minimize revenue impacts from outages like this will prove their worth with real numbers.
