18.11.2025
A widely used Internet infrastructure company said that it has largely resolved an issue that led to outages impacting users of everything from ChatGPT and the online game, “League of Legends,” on Tuesday.
Internet users around the world began to notice loading problems with their websites and social media platforms.
Cloudflare said its engineers were still mitigating some lingering issues after they posted a fix for the outage, but that they were continuing to monitor for any further problems.
Cloudflare, based in San Francisco, works behind the scenes to make the internet faster and safer, but when problems flare up “it results in massive digital gridlock” for internet users, cybersecurity expert Mike Chapple said.
While most people think there’s a direct line between their digital device and a website, what actually happens is that companies like Cloudflare sits in the middle of those connections, he said.
Cloudflare is a “content delivery network” that takes content from 20 percent of the world’s websites and mirrors them on thousands of servers worldwide, said Chapple, an information technology professor at the University of Notre Dame’s Mendoza College of Business.
“When you access a website protected by Cloudflare, your computer doesn’t connect directly to that site,” Chapple said. “Instead, it connects to the nearest Cloudflare server, which might be very close to your home. That protects the website from a flood of traffic, and it provides you with a faster response. It’s a win-win for everyone, until it fails, and 20 percent of the internet goes down at the same time.”
Last month Microsoft had to deploy a fix to address an outage of their Azure cloud portal that left users unable to access Office 365, Minecraft and other services. The tech company wrote on its Azure status page that a configuration change to its Azure infrastructure caused the outage. AP