Overview of the Cloudflare Outage

On 19 November 2025, Cloudflare Inc. experienced a significant service disruption that lasted approximately six hours. The outage was triggered by an internal permissions change within the company’s Bot Management system. The change produced an oversized feature file that was repeatedly injected into the proxy services, causing a cascading failure across the network.

The fault was identified as a bug in the configuration handling of the Bot Management system, which generated an invalid feature file that was distributed throughout Cloudflare’s infrastructure. This fault propagated to the majority of sites that rely on Cloudflare’s edge network, resulting in a partial global outage affecting roughly 20 % of the web.

Scope of Impact

  • General Internet Services: A large portion of the global internet became inaccessible for several hours, affecting millions of websites and online services.
  • Cryptocurrency Platforms: The outage impacted several key crypto sites, including exchanges and blockchain information portals, highlighting the vulnerability of centralized infrastructure in a sector that promotes decentralization.
  • Regional Effects: In Vietnam, many news sites and web platforms resumed operations only after the outage was resolved, underscoring the international reach of the disruption.
  • European Perspective: European officials cited the incident as a reminder of the need to diversify digital infrastructure and strengthen resilience against similar systemic failures.

Company Response

Cloudflare publicly acknowledged the incident and confirmed that services were restored after hours of internal investigation and remediation. The company’s CEO issued an explanation that the root cause was an internal system failure due to the configuration change mentioned above. No further details regarding the duration of the outage or the precise number of affected sites were released at the time of reporting.

Financial Context

Cloudflare’s market data as of 17 November 2025 shows a closing share price of $196.53 on the New York Stock Exchange (ticker: CF). The company’s 52‑week range spans from a low of $89.42 (6 April 2025) to a high of $260 (2 November 2025). With a market capitalization of approximately $68.84 billion, Cloudflare remains a significant player in the information technology sector despite its recent negative price‑earnings ratio of -682.71.

Conclusion

The incident on 19 November 2025 demonstrates the critical role that Cloudflare plays in the global internet ecosystem and the potential systemic risk posed by single points of failure within major infrastructure providers. The event has prompted discussions across multiple regions about the necessity of enhancing digital sovereignty and infrastructure resilience.