ISLAMABAD – Part of internet went dark for millions on Tuesday as Cloudflare, one of the world’s largest web infrastructure and security providers, suffered a massive outage.
Users trying to access everything from major platforms like X to small personal blogs were met with 500 Internal Server Errors. In a twist of irony, DownDetector, the key site people turn to for tracking outages, was itself unreachable because it relies on Cloudflare’s protection, leaving users in the dark about just how widespread the problem was.
The outage was not just a minor hiccup. Cloudflare’s Turnstile, its alternative to traditional CAPTCHA systems, failed globally. This meant users couldn’t log in or pass verification challenges on countless websites. Older “I’m not a Robot” CAPTCHA threw error messages asking users to “Please unblock challenges.cloudflare.com,” even though the servers were simply failing.
Website owners were also locked out of their Cloudflare Dashboards, unable to investigate or fix the problem. From personal blogs to high-profile landing pages, the internet was effectively frozen.
Cloudflare System Status
In progress – Scheduled maintenance is currently in progress. We will provide updates as necessary. Nov 18, 2025 – 12:00 UTC
IT said the company is performing scheduled maintenance in PPT (Tahiti) datacenter on 2025-11-18 between 12:00 and 16:00 UTC.
Traffic might be re-routed from this location, hence there is a possibility of a slight increase in latency during this maintenance window for end-users in the affected region. For PNI / CNI customers connecting with us in this location, please make sure you are expecting this traffic to fail over elsewhere during this maintenance window as network interfaces in this datacenter may become temporarily unavailable.
Websites that use Cloudflare’s proxy services were hit hardest, while sites that bypass Cloudflare remained online.
This outage highlights just how dependent the modern web has become on centralized infrastructure. When a single provider like Cloudflare goes down, the ripple effects can be massive, cutting off access to services large and small across the globe. For hours today, the web reminded everyone how fragile even the most essential digital systems really are.
X, Websites, and Turnstile down amid major Cloudflare Outage
