It seems like the internet breaks every other week these days. If it isn’t Amazon’s AWS sweeping out the web’s legs, then it’s a Cloudflare outage knocking down a chunk of the internet. Several users, including Stuff’s editorial team, have experienced load issues with websites like X, Canva, and DownDetector. That’s right — DownDetector.
Sending up a Cloudflare
If you’ve somehow managed to avoid having a Cloudflare error blasted in your face as you surfed the web this afternoon, count your lucky stars. Others haven’t been quite so lucky and have been left unable to access several websites, including X and ChatGPT, according to Sky News. The errors first showed their faces earlier today, with Cloudflare first acknowledging the fault at 13h48 SAST.
Fortunately, as of 15h09, the folks over at Cloudflare have identified the issue, and a “fix is being implemented.” Unfortunately, there’s no timeline for when the issue might officially be resolved, with the latest from the team reading: “We are continuing working on restoring service for application services customers,” it said at 15h35.
Users may have trouble loading websites such as Facebook, AWS, bet365, Canva, Spotify, BrightHR, and even League of Legends (though some fresh air might do them some good, if we’re honest).
UPDATE (19/11/25, 09h33): As of 16h42 SAST on Tuesday, 18 November, Cloudflare issued a notice claiming that the issue had been resolved, though it failed to mention the cause of the hours-long outage: “A fix has been implemented and we believe the incident is now resolved. We are continuing to monitor for errors to ensure all services are back to normal.” A further update at 19h44 claimed “services are currently operating normally. We are no longer observing elevated errors or latency across the network,” noting that it was safe to re-enable any Cloudflare services that were disabled during the outage.
