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Cloudflare Restores Service After Global Outage as Cause Traced to Oversized Config File

Cloudflare attributes the disruption to an oversized auto-generated threat-traffic file, not a cyberattack.

Overview

  • The November 18 outage began around 12:00 UTC and disrupted hundreds of sites, including X, Spotify, Canva and AI services such as ChatGPT, Perplexity and Claude.
  • Cloudflare said network errors and latency returned to normal later in the day and advised customers it was safe to re-enable services that had been turned off during the incident.
  • The company reported that a routinely generated configuration for managing threat traffic grew beyond expected size and crashed traffic-handling software, with no evidence of malicious activity.
  • SupportMy.website issued a preliminary model estimating potential global losses of $5 billion to $15 billion per hour, based on assumptions about Cloudflare’s customer base and redundancy.
  • Finance Magnates estimated the roughly three-hour disruption cost an average forex/CFD broker about $1.58 billion in trading volume, with firms including Monaxa, Skilling, Xtrade and FXPro reported as affected.