Cloudflare outage: Major tech glitches in recent years

SAN FRANCISCO – Web infrastructure firm Cloudflare was hit by a global outage on Nov 18, leaving major internet platforms inaccessible globally.

This is the second major internet disruption in 2025 since the malfunction of Amazon’s cloud services unit Amazon Web Services (AWS) in October.

Here are some of the biggest tech outages in recent years, in chronological order:

British Airways

International Airlines Group-owned British Airways was hit by a major computer system failure in May 2017 that stranded 75,000 passengers over a holiday weekend, sparking a public relations disaster and pledges from the carrier that it would do better in future.

According to media reports, the blackout was caused by a maintenance contractor who accidentally switched off power.

Alphabet

Some of Google’s most popular services, including YouTube, Gmail and Google Drive, were down for an hour during an outage on Dec 14, 2020. According to outage monitoring website Downdetector, more than 12,000 YouTube users were affected in various parts of the world, including the US, Britain and India.

Fastly

In June 2021, thousands of government, news and social media websites across the globe were hit by a widespread hour-long outage linked to US-based cloud company Fastly.

The issue affected several high traffic sites, including Reddit, Amazon, CNN, PayPal, Spotify, Al Jazeera Media Network and The New York Times, with outages ranging from a few minutes to around an hour.

Akamai

Websites of dozens of financial institutions and airlines in Australia and the US were briefly down on June 17, 2021, due to server-related glitches at content delivery network provider Akamai. According to the firm, the problem was caused by a bug in its software.

Meta

Meta-owned social media platforms Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram went dark for six hours on Oct 4, 2021, with 10.6 million users reporting problems worldwide. The company said the outage was caused by a faulty configuration change.

X Corp

Social media platform Twitter suffered a major outage on Dec 28, 2022, leaving tens of thousands of users globally unable to access it or use its key features for several hours before services appeared to come back online.

Downdetector tracked more than 10,000 affected users from the US, about 2,500 from Japan, and about 2,500 from Britain at the peak of the disruption.

CrowdStrike

A software update by global cyber-security firm CrowdStrike

triggered systems problems

for Microsoft customers that resulted in hours-long global computer systems outages on July 19, 2024.

Services from airlines to healthcare, shipping and finance were impacted globally. After the outage was resolved, companies were left dealing with backlogs of delayed and cancelled flights and medical appointments, missed orders and other issues that took days to solve.

AWS

Amazon’s cloud services unit, which hosts applications and computer processes for companies around the world,

was hit by an outage

on Oct 20, 2025, disrupting operations across multiple industries around the world and taking down several popular apps, including Reddit and Snapchat.

The disruption knocked workers from London to Tokyo offline and halted others from conducting normal everyday tasks like paying hairdressers or changing their airline tickets.

It was at least the third time in five years that AWS’ northern Virginia cluster, known as US-East-1, contributed to a major internet meltdown.

Cloudflare

The web infrastructure firm, whose network handles about a fifth of web traffic, was hit by an outage preventing thousands from accessing major internet platforms, including X and ChatGPT, on Nov 18, 2025.

Cloudflare said it was “experiencing an internal service degradation”.

In an update, it said it implemented a fix for the underlying issue, adding that “the incident is now resolved”. REUTERS