Last Updated:
A major Cloudflare malfunction caused global outages for X, ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Canva, and more, sparking memes and frustration on X and Reddit.
Several users turned to other social media platforms to check if the service had crashed.
Several platforms, including X (formerly Twitter), OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Canva, and others, experienced a global outage, bringing tasks to a grinding halt for users. The disruption, which has persisted for a few hours, saw reports of service failures steadily increasing across multiple countries.
From 500 errors, failed dashboards, broken APIs, to login sessions timing out — the outage hit almost every corner of the internet. Even Cloudflare’s own dashboard and API were failing.
According to DownDetector, which tracks outages by collating status reports from several sources, including user-submitted errors on its platform, the disruption began around today evening when an issue with Cloudflare’s support portal provider surfaced, quickly spreading to broader service problems.
In many cases, users attempting to reach these websites have reported being blocked by a generic message, such as “Please unblock challenges.cloudflare.com to proceed,” which prevents access to the protected site.
Outage Sparks Social Media Frenzy
The outage became a trending topic on social media as frustrated users found humour in their predicament. X and Reddit were flooded with memes and witty remarks.
One user said, “X is down, Cloudflare is down Pack up people, day is over.”
Another posted, “X went down for a minute just now. Even their host server on Cloudflare was down.”
Another wrote, “Looks like X is down because of Cloudflare issues. Downdetector also inaccessible.”
The outage also triggered a wave of humour and commentary across Reddit.
One Redditor joked, “Twitter X is down in some location? 1 month ago Elon Musk was having fun with AWS Amazon when it was down. Karma is a good thing, isn’t it?”
Another confused user wrote, “What why x(ex-twitter) is also down!” while someone else asked, “How is everyone enjoying Reddit while X is down?”
Cloudflare’s Statement
Cloudflare has confirmed the incident, explaining that it is examining a major malfunction affecting many of its customers.
In a brief statement, Cloudflare said, “We are working to understand the full impact and mitigate this problem,” assuring that further details will be shared soon.
Shobhit Gupta is a sub-editor at News18.com and covers India and International news. He is interested in day to day political affairs in India and geopolitics. He earned his BA Journalism (Hons) degree from Ben…Read More
Shobhit Gupta is a sub-editor at News18.com and covers India and International news. He is interested in day to day political affairs in India and geopolitics. He earned his BA Journalism (Hons) degree from Ben… Read More
November 18, 2025, 20:57 IST
Read More
