Cloudflare outage disrupts services across Germany: ChatGPT, X and major platforms affected
A widespread Cloudflare outage on 18 November caused significant disruptions across Germany, where users reported problems accessing X (formerly Twitter), Facebook, Instagram, Spotify, ChatGPT and numerous German news websites. Many platforms either failed to load or displayed server errors instead of normal content, reports NewsToday24.
The incident affected a substantial number of services relied upon daily by German users and businesses.
Cloudflare’s infrastructure is responsible for load balancing, protection against DDoS attacks and stable routing of internet traffic. Because countless websites depend on Cloudflare’s network layers, even a single internal malfunction triggered simultaneous failures across unrelated platforms in Germany and other countries.
In Germany, the first issues were recorded shortly after 12:30 local time. Users in Berlin, Hamburg, Frankfurt, Munich and Düsseldorf experienced intermittent failures while trying to access major platforms. Cloudflare confirmed that it was investigating a problem impacting “multiple customers” worldwide. The situation escalated further when DownDetector — a service used to track outages — also became unstable, making it difficult to assess the full scope of the malfunction in real time.
Later in the afternoon, Cloudflare acknowledged a wave of 500-level errors and partial downtime affecting its Dashboard and API. Engineers began restoring traffic routing, but many German users continued facing error screens and delayed loading for several hours as the network stabilised.
German users reported widespread problems across multiple popular platforms, including:
- X (Twitter) — timelines froze, login errors
- Facebook — slow loading, connection failures
- Instagram — profiles, posts and reels failing to load
- Spotify — unstable streaming and error messages
- ChatGPT — service unavailable, “network error” during requests
- Discord — issues connecting to German servers
- GitHub Pages — downtime for developer pages used by German companies
- German online media — several news portals temporarily went offline
- E-commerce sites — shops using Cloudflare CDN in Germany experienced interruptions
- Corporate websites — particularly those with Cloudflare security layers
Service restoration occurred gradually, and some regions such as North Rhine-Westphalia and Bavaria experienced delays due to traffic rerouting.
By around 16:45 German time, Cloudflare announced that the issue had been resolved. In a statement provided to TechRadar, the company explained that at 11:20 UTC it detected an unexpected surge of “unusual traffic” hitting one of its services. This sudden spike disrupted routing paths across part of the Cloudflare network. The origin of this abnormal traffic remains unknown.
The outage highlighted how strongly the German internet ecosystem relies on a few major infrastructure providers. Similar incidents, including a recent Amazon Web Services failure, have shown that when a single large backbone provider experiences a disruption, the consequences rapidly spread across unrelated platforms and sectors.
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