A technical issue at Cloudflare—the internet’s traffic cop—caused a global outage, stopping sites like X from loading.
REMEMBER that feeling when your favorite app or website just wouldn’t load?
That’s exactly what happened across the globe on Tuesday evening (Nov 18) when a key player in the internet’s plumbing, a company called Cloudflare, ran into some serious technical problems.
Lots of popular sites, including the social media platform X (you know, the one formerly known as Twitter), suddenly stopped working. Instead of seeing your feed, you probably saw a confusing error message about an “internal server error.”
What is Cloudflare, anyway?
Think of Cloudflare like the security guard and traffic cop for a huge chunk of the internet. They make sure websites don’t get taken down by cyberattacks and that they can handle millions of visitors all at once.
If Cloudflare has a bad day, a lot of websites have a bad day, too!
The company quickly admitted there was an issue, saying they were investigating widespread “500 errors”—that’s a technical code for when the server hosting the site is having an internal problem.
Their own dashboard (the tool they use to manage their service) was also down, showing just how big the problem was.
Even Down Detector, the website people use to check if other websites are down, was briefly affected! When it finally loaded, it showed a massive spike in reported outages everywhere.
For a few frustrating minutes, if a site was protected by Cloudflare, all you could do was wait and try again.
Luckily, the company worked fast to fix the issue and get everyone back online.
