The disruptions were also felt on social media platform X, which experienced widespread outages across the United States and other countries. Downdetector, an outage tracking website, recorded over 11,500 reports of issues with X by 6:41 AM ET. The cause of the outage on X remains unclear, and it is uncertain if the issues are connected to Cloudflare’s network problems.
A wide range of online services are currently experiencing disruptions due to a technical issue affecting Cloudflare's global network; incident not related to country-level internet disruptions or filtering pic.
Cloudflare confirmed that its support portal was also affected, making it difficult for users to access or respond to support cases. The company is working with its third-party provider to understand the full scope of the problem and to mitigate its impact.
Global internet watchdog NetBlocks also reported disruptions in a range of online services, attributing the outages to Cloudflare’s technical issues. The organization clarified that the disruptions were not the result of government-level internet filtering or disruptions.
Reports of problems from Pakistan began surfacing around 4:10 PM, with users experiencing issues related to Cloudflare’s services. As of now, both Cloudflare and X have not responded to reThe real reason for the internet chaos was a little-known technology term, a ’latent bug,’ as described by Cloudflare CTO, Dane Knecht.
Multiple of the world’s online giant platforms, including X, ChatGPT, Spotify, and numerous other websites that solely rely on the internet’s big king, Cloudflare, for cyber security and traffic management, were dealt a huge outage on Tuesday, November 18, 2025.
The outage has sent shock waves, turning the internet world into complete chaos.
The real reason for the internet chaos was a little-known technology term, a ’latent bug,’ as described by Cloudflare CTO, Dane Knecht.
As the confusion escalated, Cloudflare’s Chief Technology Officer, Dane Knecht, took to X (formerly Twitter) to explain what caused the internet outage.
He detailed down, writing, ”The disruption was caused by a 'latent bug.'"
He brushed off any cyberattack, spiraling into global disruption.
He added, “In short, a latent bug in a service underpinning our bot mitigation capability started to crash after a routine configuration change we made. That cascaded into a broad degradation to our network and other services. This was not an attack.”
However, Knecht promised customers that such an outage would never happen again: “Work is already underway to make sure it does not happen again, but I know it caused real pain today.”
It’s almost impossible to detect these bugs because they don’t show up during routine testing.
Normally, they (latent bug) only abruptly surface when a very rare combination of conditions comes together. Once activated, the bug can cause unexpected and potentially widespread system failures.quests for additional comment.