Cloudflare is down worldwide: Internal server error explained

Cloudflare is down. If you are trying to access your favorite websites, login portals, or even your company’s support dashboard and finding nothing but spinning wheels or error messages, you are not alone.

Is Cloudflare down?

The short answer is: Yes, there are significant issues.

Cloudflare, the backbone ensuring security and speed for a massive chunk of the internet, is currently experiencing a “Global Network” issue. But today’s outage comes with a twist that highlights just how dependent the modern web is on this single service.

Screenshot taken from Cloudflare The ultimate irony: You can’t even check if Cloudflare is down

When the internet breaks, the first reflex for most users is to visit Downdetector.com to see if others are having the same problem. It is the standard “fire alarm” of the internet.

However, today presents a unique and somewhat humorous (if it wasn’t so frustrating) problem: Downdetector itself relies on Cloudflare.

Users attempting to visit Downdetector to report the Cloudflare outage are currently being greeted with a blank white screen and a specific error message:

Please unblock https://www.google.com/url?sa=E&source=gmail&q=challenges.cloudflare.com to continue.

What does this mean? Downdetector uses Cloudflare to stop bots from spamming their site. To do this, they load a “challenge” (like a CAPTCHA or a background script) from challenges.cloudflare.com. Because Cloudflare is experiencing issues, that security check is failing to load. Consequently, the site that tells you if the internet is broken is, effectively, broken by the very thing it is trying to monitor.

Official status: What we know

According to Cloudflarestatus.com, the company confirmed the outage shortly before noon UTC.

Latest update (Nov 18, 2025 – 11:48 UTC):

Cloudflare Global Network experiencing issues Investigating – Cloudflare is aware of, and investigating an issue which potentially impacts multiple customers. Further detail will be provided as more information becomes available.

Because this is a “Global Network” issue, it is not isolated to one region. Users are seeing:

• Infinite loops: Browser checks that verify if you are human are stuck on loop.
• Support portals down: Cloudflare’s own support portal is struggling, meaning IT admins cannot easily file tickets.
• 502/504 Errors: “Bad Gateway” errors across thousands of websites.

Is it just maintenance?

A look at the deeper logs shows that Cloudflare had a heavy schedule of maintenance planned for today, November 18, 2025.

While maintenance is usually seamless (traffic is re-routed to other cities), the volume of simultaneous work combined with the global alert suggests something may have gone wrong during these updates or a separate incident has occurred.

Scheduled maintenance is currently active or recently concluded in:

• LAX (Los Angeles)
• MIA (Miami)
• GUA (Guatemala City)
• ATL (Atlanta)
• ORD (Chicago)

If you are in these regions, your connection might be rerouted, causing higher latency (lag), but the global error indicates the problem has spread beyond these specific data centers.

What should you do?

1. Don’t panic (and don’t clear your cache): This is a server-side issue. Clearing your cookies or restarting your router will not fix challenges.cloudflare.com failing to load.
2. Wait it out: Cloudflare engineers are notoriously fast. “Investigating” usually turns to “Identified” and “Fixing” within minutes to an hour.

We will update this article as the status changes from “Investigating” to “Resolved.”