On November 18, 2025, Cloudflare suffered what turned out to be its worst global outage since 2019. For over three hours, large portions of the internet, including e-commerce sites, SaaS tools, and even some banks, slowed to a crawl or just didn’t work. If your business depends on Cloudflare for DNS, CDN, or security, you probably noticed customers refreshing pages or pinging your team, wanting to know what was going on.
Plenty of users jumped straight to “hack!” as an explanation for the Cloudflare Outage on social media, because that’s pretty much the default reaction these days. But Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince quickly confirmed that it was not a cyberattack, ransomware, or the work of a nation-state actor. It turns out it was just an internal permission change that had a ripple effect no one expected.
If Hackers Didn’t Do It, What Did?
That small permission tweak caused a feature-flag file to balloon, and it rolled out across Cloudflare’s global edge fleet before anyone realized what was happening. The software couldn't handle the increased load, triggering cascading failures. Systems stalled, and customers worldwide felt it.
Engineers brought things back online in a few hours. But for companies staring at blank dashboards, it felt a lot longer. What business owners juggling IT leadership challenges and CIO strategic burdens can't afford to ignore, though, is that minor misconfigurations can cause a rock-solid infrastructure to stumble.
IT Leadership Is Struggling To Keep Up With Increasing Complexity
Outages happen, but this one popped up right when executive tech expectations are sky-high, especially regarding AI adoption and its effects on network resources. Boards are pushing hard for AI tools, so teams are trying to build shiny new things while still keeping the lights on. They’re suffering from enterprise AI fatigue, chasing the next LLM integration, while legacy config management is still a massive risk.
Cloudflare’s outage is a reminder that even non-AI systems can bring your operation to a crashing halt. So think about it: What actually breaks if your team makes a similar mistake? If the answer is “everything,” you have an architecture problem. And when things go wrong, your customers don't care if it’s because of a hack or a config error. All they see is a spinning loader and a broken checkout button.
If nothing else, the incident should remind you to check on your failover protection. When was the last time you tested it? Are you just assuming it will kick in when you need it? “99.99% uptime” doesn’t mean much when the single point protecting you from the world is the one that fails.
Companies Got Back Online Quickly (This Time)
The Cloudflare incident shows that fixing a configuration error is much easier than fixing a security breach. Normal operations resumed in just over three hours, with full recovery a few hours later, because engineers knew exactly what broke.
The disruption was a good reality check: tiny details can still take everything down. Skip the basics, and you’ll feel it the next time something misfires.
