Note: This is my personal breakdown of the November 18, 2025 Cloudflare outage, focused on practical lessons for solo devs and small teams—not an official postmortem.
On 18 November 2025, a Cloudflare outage briefly broke a scary amount of the internet.
Major platforms like X (Twitter), ChatGPT, Canva, Grindr and thousands of smaller apps started throwing errors at the same time. If your app sat behind Cloudflare, your users probably thought you went down—even though the root cause was far outside your code.
According to Cloudflare's own incident write‑up, the problem wasn't a cyberattack. It was:
a bug in Cloudflare's bot mitigation system, triggered by a routine configuration change, which caused a spike in abnormal traffic handling and widespread failures across the edge network.
The outage window was roughly 11:48 UTC → 14:42 UTC, with some lingering effects as systems recovered.
In this post I'll cover:
- What actually happened during the November 2025 Cloudflare outage
- Why a single provider can take such a big chunk of the web with it
- A concrete checklist you can apply as a solo dev to make your own apps more resilient
1. What broke in the November 18, 2025 Cloudflare outage?
From the outside, it just looked like:
- Pages not loading
- APIs timing out
- "Something went wrong" errors everywhere
Under the hood, Cloudflare later explained:
- A bot mitigation feature had a bug
- A routine config change triggered that bug at global scale
- This impacted how Cloudflare handled traffic at the edge
- Result: a wave of 5xx errors for sites sitting behind Cloudflare
Some key points:
- Not a cyberattack – this wasn't a DDoS or breach, it was self‑inflicted logic/config error
- Control plane vs data plane – a change in how bots are filtered ended up affecting real user traffic
- Global blast radius – because Cloudflare runs a massive shared edge network, one bad change had worldwide impact
Cloudflare's CTO publicly apologized and called the incident "unacceptable", committing to better safeguards around config rollouts and error handling.
For you and me, the important question isn't "why did Cloudflare mess up?". It's:
"What does this kind of failure mode mean for my apps?"
2. Why this kind of outage hurts small projects so much
If you're a solo dev or small team, you probably use Cloudflare for one or more of:
- DNS (authoritative nameservers)
- Proxy / CDN (orange-cloud enabled)
- Security (WAF, bot protection, rate limiting)
- Workers / KV / D1 / R2 (your actual app stack)
On November 18, all of that compressed into one simple user experience:
"Your site is down."
And here's the uncomfortable truth:
- Users don't care why you're down
- Clients often don't distinguish between your code and your providers
- Social proof ("is this product reliable?") takes a hit even if the root cause wasn't your bug
For SEO, a few hours of downtime usually won't tank your rankings. But for trust, even one very visible incident can make you look fragile.
That's why I like to design for graceful failure, not just "works perfectly" vs "500 everywhere".
3. Concrete reliability lessons from the November 2025 outage
3.1. Treat providers as dependencies, not magic
Cloudflare is extremely good at what it does. But incidents like November 18 prove:
- No provider is "too big to fail"
- "We're on Cloudflare, so we're safe" is not a reliability strategy
Instead, explicitly model Cloudflare (and every major service you use) as a dependency:
- DNS: Cloudflare
- Edge + WAF: Cloudflare
- App hosting: Vercel / Fly / Railway / your VPS
- Database: Postgres provider (Neon, Supabase, RDS, etc.)
- Auth: Clerk / Auth.js / etc.
Write this list down somewhere internal, even if it's just a Notion doc. It turns a mysterious outage into a known risk:
"If Cloudflare's edge misbehaves, these parts of our app will be impacted."
3.2. Build "is it me or them?" visibility
During the November outage, a lot of devs wasted time debugging their own code, thinking they'd shipped a bad deploy.
You don't want that.
At minimum:
- Bookmark Cloudflare's status page
- Bookmark your hosting/db status pages
- Set up a simple uptime monitor (BetterStack, UptimeRobot) for:
https://your-domain.com/https://your-domain.com/api/health
When something feels off:
- Check your monitors
- Check Cloudflare status
- Check your host/db status
Within 60 seconds you should be able to say:
"This is a Cloudflare incident; our origin is healthy."
That's a huge mental win during stressful incidents.
3.3. Cache and degrade gracefully for critical paths
You can soften the blow of provider issues by:
- Aggressive caching of your most important pages at the edge
- Serving a cached version + small banner if the origin or DB is unhappy
A short "we're serving a cached copy while our backend recovers" is miles better than an opaque 500.
3.4. Separate "critical" from "nice to have"
When Cloudflare has a bad day, every extra moving piece becomes a liability:
- Realtime analytics scripts
- Chat widgets
- Heavy third‑party embeds
Ask yourself:
- If this breaks, should it break the whole page?
Split features into:
- Tier A (critical): content, checkout, auth
- Tier B (nice): chat widget, advanced analytics, experimental AI helper
Then design the page so Tier A stays simple and robust, and Tier B never blocks first paint.
3.5. Capture your own mini-postmortem
After an incident like November 18:
- Write down what broke for your app
- Decide one or two changes you'll ship because of it
This post is exactly that: my small, public postmortem while the outage is still fresh.
4. Checklist: hardening your own app after the November 2025 outage
Status + monitoring
- Bookmark Cloudflare + hosting + DB status pages
- Set up at least 2 uptime checks (home + API)
- Hook up basic error logging (Sentry etc.)
Caching + fallbacks
- Cache your most important pages at the edge
- Handle API failures with user‑friendly fallbacks
- Avoid blocking the whole page on non‑critical third parties
Architecture
- Document your dependencies (DNS, edge, hosting, DB, auth)
- Sketch what happens if each one is degraded or down
- Plan a simple "degraded mode" (e.g. read‑only, cached content)
Habit
- After any major incident, ask:
- "What did this break for me?"
- "What one change can I ship to be less fragile next time?"
5. Closing thoughts
The November 18, 2025 Cloudflare outage was a reminder that even the biggest infrastructure providers can have bad days.
If you treat it as a chance to harden your own stack—improving monitoring, caching, and fallbacks—you'll be in a much stronger position the next time a big part of the internet wobbles.