Large parts of the internet are struggling to load right now, possibly due to an issue at Cloudflare.
The internet infrastructure service has confirmed issues, and is investigating the problem as we speak.
We think this could be what's causing a similar outage at Twitter, with many other popular websites seeming to stutter too - here's what we know so far...
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But good news! The issue has been identified, and a fix is on the way...
"The issue has been identified and a fix is being implemented," Cloudflare says on its update page.
Londoners can also breathe easy too - "We have made changes that have allowed Cloudflare Access and WARP to recover. Error levels for Access and WARP users have returned to pre-incident rates."
Bad news if (like me) you're in London - Cloudflare is going hard on users here in the capital in an attempt to solve things.
"During our attempts to remediate, we have disabled WARP access in London. Users in London trying to access the Internet via WARP will see a failure to connect."
We're seeing another spike in outage reports on DownDetector - but this is to be expected, as most of the east coast of the US is waking up and logging on for work right now.
Will this extra pressure on servers and services exacerbate the problem? Only time will tell...
(Image credit: DownDetector)
This must be a tough one though - for the fourth update in a row, Cloudflare's message is the same;
"We are continuing to investigate this issue."
I guess it's good they are keeping us posted?
If you think this isn't a major problem - you're wrong, it's having real human effects.
I've just tried to book some holiday time off next month on our internal HR system here at Future - but the website isn't working due to this Cloudflare outage.
No Christmas break for me, I guess....
(Image credit: Future)
Outage reports continue to drop, but there's still no official end from Cloudflare - in fact, its latest update says the opposite.
"We are continuing to investigate this issue," it posted at 12.37 UTC.
In "better" news - it seems that Twitter/X is back to full operational capacity.
This was one of the first sites to be apparently affected by the issues at Cloudflare - you can follow TechRadar's live coverage here.
It seems the issue is affecting Cloudflare internally too - especially when it comes to customer support.
"Our support portal provider is currently experiencing issues, and as such customers might encounter errors viewing or responding to support cases," the company says. "Responses on customer inquiries are not affected, and customers can still reach us via live chat (Business and Enterprise) through the Cloudflare Dashboard, or via the emergency telephone line (Enterprise)."
"We are working alongside our 3rd party provider to understand the full impact and mitigate this problem."
A positive update - Cloudflare says things may be back on the mend...
"We are seeing services recover, but customers may continue to observe higher-than-normal error rates as we continue remediation efforts," the latest update on its status page says.
Ah - it's back...but still no major news.
"We are continuing to investigate this issue," a 12.21 UTC update reads.
And in a major ironic moment - the Cloudflare status page itself is down...
"We can't connect to the server for this app or website at this time. There might be too much traffic or a configuration error."
(Image credit: Cloudflare)
Interestingly, it seems like in the UK (where I'm typing this from), things are easing up - but in the US, DownDetector is showing another small spike in outage reports...
(Image credit: DownDetector.com)
We're already seeing some drop-offs in outage reports - could this be over before it's really begun?
There's been no official confirmation or update from Cloudflare, but we'll stay tuned for now...
Interestingly, Cloudflare had earlier posted that it was planning "scheduled maintenance" on some of its servers - could this have caused the issue?
"We will be performing scheduled maintenance in SCL (Santiago) datacenter on 2025-11-18 between 12:00 and 15:00 UTC," the company said on its status page.
"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 datacentre may become temporarily unavailable."
If you're not familiar with the company, Cloudflare provides a wide range of online infrastructure backing up some of the world's biggest websites.
The company's offerings inlcude protection services against cyberattacks, particularly DDoS attacks, where victims are bombarded with huge numbers of requests.
Cloudflare has confirmed the problem, posting at 11.48am GMT;
"Cloudflare is aware of, and investigating an issue which impacts multiple customers: Widespread 500 errors, Cloudflare Dashboard and API also failing.
"We are working to understand the full impact and mitigate this problem. More updates to follow shortly."
First off - the issue appears to have hit a number of major websites, including X, formerly known as Twitter, film reviewing site Letterboxd - and even outage tracker website DownDetector, which is making tracking the issue quite tricky for us...
