The entire internet just crashed... again

· Source ↗

Watch on YouTube ↗ Summary based on the YouTube transcript and episode description.

Cloudflare’s November 2025 outage was caused by a bloated config file that crashed its own bot-mitigation system, taking down ChatGPT, X, and millions of sites.

  • Cloudflare outage hit ~6am ET on Nov 19, 2025, affecting ChatGPT, X, Down Detector, and League of Legends servers.
  • Root cause: an auto-generated config file for threat traffic grew beyond expected size, crashing bot-mitigation software.
  • Cloudflare CTO confirmed it was not an attack — a routine config change triggered a latent bug.
  • The file meant to protect against threats caused more damage than any recorded hack.
  • Cloudflare’s failure radius is outsized: it underpins DNS, DDoS protection, and bot filtering for a massive share of the web.
  • Third major once-in-a-lifetime internet outage in 2025 — prior incidents hit AWS and Azure.
  • Cloudflare published a detailed post-mortem blog at blog.cloudflare.com/18-november-2025-outage/.

2025-11-19 · Watch on YouTube

Related coverage