The internet stood still, thanks to Cloudflare. Cloudflare is a service from a US provider that is used by many websites to ensure high availability, delivery speed and security. The opposite was the case when Cloudflare once again went down on a large scale and made websites unavailable.
The Cloudflare disaster
On November 18, 2025, a Tuesday, it happened again: Cloudflare services worldwide had failed and had probably disabled many thousands of websites worldwide. Websites that rely on Cloudflare's Content Delivery Network (CDN) were not accessible. The outage lasted more than 90 minutes in the tested cases (the test did not run longer). A CDN is supposed to ensure that web content is delivered very quickly and highly available. For this purpose, the contents are held in a intermediate storage (cache) and distributed on several locations worldwide. Bot attacks should be blocked by security mechanisms.
Just a few weeks ago, there was a large-scale outage related to Cloudflare and AWS. The incident is therefore not unique, but is slowly becoming the norm. This is a good thing for the advancement of digital sovereignty in Germany.
Cloudflare itself reported this disruption in the system status, as the following image shows:
The status messages refer to "service degradation" (service degradation), but do not mention any reasons. On the same page, in addition to the global information, disruptions and their status for specific regions are listed:
- Santiago
- Tahiti
- Los Angeles
- Atlanta
This shows that the location of a server has almost no relevance: Whoever is connected to a server can access the server or is served by that server. So much for the European server location that Microsoft likes to advertise.
How many more impacts will it take before the last person understands how bad the dependence on US services such as Microsoft, Google or Cloudflare is?
The aforementioned status page lists a deterioration in performance for the following Cloudflare services:
- Bot Management
- CDN/Cache
- Firewall
- Support Site
- Workers
The internet came to a standstill, thanks to Cloudflare. Cloudflare is a service provided by a US-based company that many websites use to ensure high availability, delivery speed, and security. The opposite was true when Cloudflare went down again on a large scale, making websites unavailable. This would have been bad enough, as these are largely basic services that are supposed to ensure system stability and performance. But the Overkill was probably there for this reason:
The Cloudflare network was offline. At least notifications were still going through. So possibly at least disturbance reports, that nothing is working (except for sending disturbance reports) could be sent.
Cloudflare's support service provider was also affected by the Cloudflare outage:
Our support portal provider is currently experiencing issues, and as such customers might encounter errors viewing or responding to support cases. Responses on customer inquiries are not affected, and customers can still reach us via live chat (Business and Enterprise) through the Cloudflare Dashboard, or via the emergency telephone line (Enterprise). We are working alongside our 3rd party provider to understand the full impact and mitigate this problem.
Summary of the context of the source text: "Digital Sovereignty: When Cloudflare Fails" The internet came to a halt, all thanks to Cloudflare. Cloudflare is a service provided by an American company that is used by numerous websites to ensure high availability, fast delivery, and security. However, the opposite happened when Cloudflare experienced another widespread outage, rendering many websites inaccessible
This will not please some Cloudflare customers: The outage they wanted to report often didn't get through. The help they wanted wasn't available, possibly because the support was also based on Cloudflare. That's called a Single Point of Failure.
The cause of the outage
As Cloudflare later reported , a database error was the cause of the global problems. Specifically, the following cause was reported ([1]) :
The cause: a chain reaction
The outage was triggered by an inconspicuous change that caused a chain reaction:
- The Trigger: Cloudflare changed permissions on one of their database systems (ClickHouse). This seemingly harmless change led to the database suddenly writing double entries into an important file.
- The doubled file: This file (a "feature file") is used by the bot management system to identify automated accesses (bots). With the double entries, the file size was doubled from about 30 MB to 60 MB.
- The Domino Effect: This file was automatically distributed to all servers in the Cloudflare network worldwide. However, the software on these servers had a maximum file size programmed that was smaller than 60 MB. When the servers tried to load the oversized file, they crashed.
The problem was particularly insidious because it behaved irregularly: The faulty file was regenerated every 5 minutes. Sometimes it was created by a database server that had already been updated (in which case it was faulty), sometimes by a server that had not yet been updated (in which case it was fine).
Being dependent means existing in a community of suffering.
My name is Klaus Meffert. I have a doctorate in computer science and have been working professionally and practically with information technology for over 30 years. I also work as an expert in IT & data protection. I achieve my results by looking at technology and law. This seems absolutely essential to me when it comes to digital data protection. My company, IT Logic GmbH, also offers consulting and development of optimized and secure AI solutions.
