Stay connected with BizTech Community—follow us on Instagram and Facebook for the latest news and reviews delivered straight to you.
On November 18, 2025, the internet’s backbone broke when Cloudflare, one of the world’s biggest content delivery networks, went down for a long time. This caused problems all over the internet. Users all throughout the world had trouble accessing a wide range of services for hours, including bitcoin exchanges, blockchain explorers, AI platforms, and social media giants. The disruption was a clear reminder of how much current digital ecosystems depend on a small number of centralized providers, even in areas like bitcoin that claim to be decentralized.
About 20% of the world’s online traffic goes via Cloudflare, which protects and speeds it up. They said the problem started about 05:20 UTC and affected important services like DDoS protection, traffic routing, and encryption. The effect was quick and affected a lot of things, from money management tools to apps for talking to people every day. The corporation fixed the problem by 19:28 UTC (02:28 WIB on November 19), but the incident showed weaknesses that could have big effects for the crypto industry and other areas.
The Size of the Disruption
The outage had the biggest effect on the bitcoin market, where downtime can mean losing millions of dollars in opportunity. Many users couldn’t access major platforms like Coinbase, Blockchain.com, Ledger, BitMEX, Toncoin’s explorer, Arbiscan, and DeFiLlama. Their homepages wouldn’t load or gave them error messages. Kraken, another exchange that was affected, said it had problems from time to time but was back to normal soon after Cloudflare’s modifications went into effect.
The repercussions spread to other areas besides crypto. OpenAI’s services, such ChatGPT and Sora, were slow, which made those who rely on AI for work and creativity angry. Social media also had problems. Elon Musk’s X (previously Twitter) and Truth Social had trouble logging in and delayed feeds. Even Indonesia’s Meteorological, Climatological, and Geophysical Agency (BMKG) website fell down, making it hard to get weather updates during a very important monsoon season.
Downdetector, a service that tracks outages based on user complaints, got thousands of reports, with the most coming in around 10:00 UTC. Ironically, some users couldn’t even get to the site to report problems. The platform’s data indicated surges from the US, Europe, and Asia, which showed that Cloudflare is a global company. In a similar interview with The Guardian, Professor Alan Woodward from the Surrey Centre for Cyber Security said, “Cloudflare is the biggest company you’ve never heard of—it’s the gatekeeper for so much of the internet that when it falters, the ripple effects are enormous.”
The Cause and the Solution
Cloudflare’s official status update named the person responsible: An automated configuration file for managing threat traffic had grown too big, which caused the software that handles fundamental traffic flows to break. The corporation said in its incident report, “We saw an unusual spike in traffic around 05:20 UTC, but there were no signs of malicious activity or a cyberattack.” This internal problem, not an outside attack, made the outage worse since it messed up routing for millions of domains.
The team rolled out patches one at a time, starting with the most important services. By 09:57 UTC, most problems had been fixed. At 19:28 UTC, everything was back to normal after a step-by-step recovery that kept failures from spreading. Cloudflare’s openness—regular updates on their status page—helped keep people calm, but the hours-long disruption showed how even short outages may lead to bigger problems.
Cloudflare has had outages before; in June 2025, a similar problem took down swaths of the web for a short time, including banking sites. The November event, on the other hand, was the biggest one because it happened around the busiest times for U.S. and Asian users, which meant that it caused the most problems for crypto traders and social media users.
Why the effect was so widespread
Cloudflare is the most popular since it acts as a “reverse proxy” for the internet: It lies between users and websites and protects against DDoS attacks, speeds up CDNs, encrypts data, and verifies users. It handles 20% of all websites, so when it crashes, the effects are huge. It’s like a major highway closing at rush hour.
The crypto sector felt the damage very strongly because many platforms depend on Cloudflare for security and performance on the front end. Exchanges like Coinbase and BitMEX use it to protect themselves from attacks, and explorers like Arbiscan and DeFiLlama depend on it to keep their services running. The interruption happened at the same time as a market drop, with Bitcoin falling to $101,000 because of fears about tariffs. This made losses worse because traders couldn’t access their accounts or make transactions.
The fact that social media is so easy to hack shows that we are all dependent on it: Both X and Truth Social, which get a lot of traffic, had feed delays, and OpenAI’s tools like ChatGPT stopped working, which messed with AI-driven workflows. The fact that Indonesia’s BMKG site went black during typhoon season shows how important services might stop working. As Woodward said, Cloudflare’s obscurity to end users hides how important it is—until it breaks.
It’s funny that we still depend on Web2 infrastructure in a Web3 world: Decentralization is a big deal in crypto, yet systems like Ledger and Toncoin need centralized CDNs to grow. The recent outages of AWS and Azure in October, which took down Coinbase, Robinhood, and MetaMask for hours, made the problem worse. People are now calling for more reliable, blockchain-native alternatives like IPFS or Arweave for content distribution.
Lessons for the Cryptocurrency Business
The event shows a major weakness in crypto’s hybrid model: Blockchains like Ethereum and Solana are decentralized, but user interfaces aren’t always. “We’re only as strong as our weakest link,” tweeted crypto analyst @CryptoWhale, pointing out that a single provider’s mistake can stop billions of dollars in worth. It speeds up the move to multi-CDN setups or decentralized frontends, like those on ENS domains, for exchanges.
Regulators might want to pay attention: The U.S. CFTC and SEC could require regulated platforms to include backups as part of the GENIUS Act of 2025. The EU’s MiCA, on the other hand, focuses on operational resilience. For users, it’s a reminder to use more than one wallet or VPN and to keep an eye on status pages like Cloudflare’s.
As things calm down, the best thing about the outage is that it was short: full recovery in less than 14 hours meant less permanent damage. But with cyber dangers on the rise—2025 breaches costing CertiK $2.1 billion—it shows how important it is to have strong backups in a world where everything is connected.
