On the morning of November 18, 2025 (local time), a glitch struck the global network of Cloudflare, a prominent internet infrastructure service provider. This anomaly triggered widespread access failures, with numerous websites—including the social media platform X—displaying “internal server error” messages. The disruption rippled across multiple sectors, impacting retail, e-commerce, social media, financial services, and transportation platforms. Users found themselves unable to access these services as usual.

Before the U.S. stock market opened for trading, Cloudflare’s stock price plummeted by over 5%. The company later claimed to have resolved the issue in under four hours. Yet, as of 10:00 PM Beijing time on the same day, a significant number of websites continued to report 500 errors. Notably, this incident marked yet another in a series of large-scale outages for Cloudflare, with its system having previously suffered similar disruptions on multiple occasions.