On 18 November 2025, Cloudflare experienced a major global outage that knocked many websites and online platforms offline for minutes or longer. The company reported an "internal service degradation" that caused widespread HTTP 500 errors and other access failures. According to multiple reports, the disruption began around 11:20 UTC when Cloudflare cited a "spike in unusual traffic" to one of its services as the trigger.

ecause Cloudflare functions as a content delivery network (CDN), DNS provider, reverse-proxy and routing platform, it sits underneath a large portion of the internet's traffic. Many digital services rely on it to handle web traffic, deliver assets, mitigate DDoS attacks, and optimize performance. Just how extensive is its footprint? It supports roughly 20% of all websites, according to usage metrics.

When Cloudflare's network falters, the visible symptom is often that websites show Cloudflare's "Internal Server Error" or "Please try again in a few minutes" pages—even if the underlying origin server (a website's own hosting) is fully operational. This is exactly what we saw with Lemon Web Solutions: our host was working, your browser was working, but the Cloudflare layer between you and the host failed.

Because of the scale of Cloudflare, the outage extended to major platforms. For example: 

In short: when Cloudflare's routing layer hiccups, a chunk of the internet visibly flicks off—even if web-hosts, apps and data-centres themselves are unaffected.

What It Means for Lemon Web Solutions

As Lemon Web Solutions uses Cloudflare's services (for DNS coverage, CDN caching, security and traffic routing), we were directly impacted in this incident. Our hosting server remained alive, our CMS was ready, but because the traffic to our site passes through Cloudflare, users experienced interruptions.

For you, this may have meant: delayed access, error messages when accessing parts of the site or apps, and general service unreliability during the outage window. Importantly: this was not a failure on our hosting server or hosting provider — the fault lies in the infrastructure layer (Cloudflare) that sits between you and us.

Why Such an Outage Is So Significant

There are a few reasons why a Cloudflare outage has outsized effects:

What We're Doing and What We can Do

Here at Lemon Web Solutions:

What you can do:

Final Words

This incident serves as a stark reminder of how much of today's web depends on intermediary infrastructure layers. The fact that a single node/network provider's disruption could ripple out and affect so many major platforms — including ChatGPT, X and many others — shows that even large, well-architected systems have vulnerability points.

For Lemon Web Solutions, this outage was not our own server malfunction; it was the transit layer (Cloudflare) failing momentarily. We are now back online and monitoring the situation closely.

If you're curious about more technical details (for example: which data-centres were affected, how Cloudflare's network architecture responded, or what fallback strategies exist for websites) I can pull up and write a deeper technical post. Let me know if you'd like that.