A significant internet disruption on Tuesday, November 18, 2025, took down several major global platforms, including the social media site X and the AI chatbot ChatGPT. The outage was traced back to a latent bug within the systems of US-based online services provider Cloudflare, a company that manages roughly 20% of the world's internet traffic.
What Caused the Widespread Internet Blackout?
The problem began after a routine configuration change at Cloudflare triggered a previously hidden flaw. According to the company's Chief Technology Officer, Dane Knecht, who posted an explanation on X, the bug was located in a service that underpins their bot mitigation capability. This caused the service to crash, leading to a failure that impacted large amounts of global internet traffic that rely on Cloudflare's infrastructure.
Web monitoring service Downdetector confirmed widespread user reports of issues. Beyond X and ChatGPT, the disruption also affected the popular video game League of Legends and some services from Google. The incident had an immediate financial impact, with Cloudflare's share price dropping by 1.5 percent during early trading following the outage.
Echoes of Past Cloud Failures
This event is a stark reminder of the internet's reliance on a few key infrastructure providers. It closely mirrors outages experienced last month with cloud giants Amazon (AWS) and Microsoft, which also disrupted online services for businesses, transport firms, and video games.
Professor Alan Woodward, a cybersecurity expert at the University of Surrey in England, commented on this concentration of power. He noted that while these large providers are necessary to deliver the scale and global reach demanded by major brands, their failures have significant consequences. "It's a double-edged sword," Woodward stated, highlighting the vulnerability of the modern web.
Lessons for a Connected World
For internet users in Nigeria and across the globe, this incident underscores a critical point: the digital ecosystem is more interconnected and fragile than it often appears. The swift resolution of the Cloudflare bug brought services back online, but the event serves as a crucial lesson in digital dependency and the importance of robust, resilient online infrastructure.
