Internet stopped. Cloudflare outage on November 18 broke hundreds of websites, including McDonald’s kiosks

A major outage affecting Cloudflare services has disrupted or significantly slowed hundreds of websites worldwide. The problem affected ChatGPT, the social platform X, Spotify, and several news outlets, including Videocardz and The Register. Even Downdetector, a service typically used to monitor internet outages, was temporarily unavailable.

Cloudflare stated that the company was aware of the incident, which affected some customers. Specialists quickly began investigating the cause. In a subsequent statement, the company clarified that it had detected an unusual surge in traffic to one of its internal services, which caused errors in some requests passing through its network. Cloudflare has not yet identified the source of this surge but emphasized that it is working to ensure the stable operation of its entire infrastructure.

Shortly later, Cloudflare announced the implementation of a fix. Since then, Downdetector has begun recording a decrease in the number of complaints. The company noted that it continues to monitor the network to ensure full service restoration.

Amid the outage, users shared images from McDonald’s self-service kiosks, which also displayed errors similar to those typically seen on websites during technical issues.

Late that evening, Cloudflare CTO Dane Knecht announced in a post on the X platform that the incident was caused by a hidden bug that manifested itself after a configuration change in the service responsible for countering bot attacks. This led to the disruption of the network and several other services. He asserted that it was not a cyberattack.