A major Cloudflare outage on November 18 temporarily disrupted much of the internet, taking down platforms such as X, Reddit, ChatGPT, Coinbase, and multiple crypto services, and causing an estimated billions of dollars in global economic losses. The incident exposed how dependent the digital economy remains on centralized cloud infrastructure, despite the decentralization narrative promoted by the crypto industry. Cloudflare attributed the outage to a faulty bot-management configuration file that exceeded system limits, crashing key services—but confirmed it was not a cyberattack. The event reignited concerns from tech leaders about systemic risks tied to centralized cloud providers, emphasizing the need for more decentralized, locally running AI and infrastructure solutions. Alex Ioannou reports for 99 Bitcoins:
Cloudflare outage caused billions of dollars in losses as the internet seemingly came to a standstill. The disruption affected many users trying to access X, Truth Social, Reddit, ChatGPT, Coinbase, Ledger, BitMEX, DefiLlama, and many more.
Ironically, many of the affected platforms and websites were crypto-related, a sector that promotes decentralization. However, a single cloud hosting protocol going down in Cloudflare subsequently brought the internet to a standstill, highlighting just how centralized much of the World Wide Web still is. […]
“Today’s Cloudflare outage exposed how dependent we are on a few centralized AI and cloud gateways. This is a systemic risk. The current AI and cloud stack is incredibly fragile, which can lead to disruptions of salaries, transactions, and business operations during an outage like this. […]
While Cloudflare has since reported everything is back up and running, yesterday’s outage is reported to have cost the global economy multiple billions of dollars, with one report that for every hour Cloudflare was down, $15Bn was being lost. […]
Just last month, in October 2025, an incident involving AWS brought the likes of Coinbase, Robinhood, MetaMask, Venmo, and non-crypto services like Snapchat and Reddit to a grinding halt for multiple hours until the issue was resolved.
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