TL;DR

A Cloudflare system failure caused a major global internet outage Tuesday.
The outage impacted major crypto platforms including Coinbase and Ledger.
The incident revived concerns over crypto’s centralized infrastructure dependencies.

On November 18, 2025, a technical failure at Cloudflare paralyzed digital services across continents. Websites and applications relying on the company’s network infrastructure—including social media platform X and AI service ChatGPT—became unreachable for hours. 

Users encountered error messages or blank pages, while businesses dependent on Cloudflare’s security tools faced operational halts. The outage began around 9:30 a.m. UTC and persisted for nearly three hours before partial recovery commenced.

Cloudflare Suffers Worldwide Service Disruption

A technical failure at Cloudflare caused a widespread internet disruption on Tuesday. The company handles about twenty percent of global web traffic. Its bot detection system encountered a critical fault, which temporarily removed roughly twenty percent of webpages from online access. Several major cryptocurrency platforms experienced service interruptions.

Cloudflare issued a statement explaining the cause. A feature file in its Bot Management system expanded beyond normal limits, triggering a software failure. Initially, the company suspected a large-scale digital attack, but engineers later confirmed no cyberattack or malicious activity occurred. The system fault alone caused the outage.

Crypto Industry Confronts Infrastructure Dependencies

The list of affected crypto services included Coinbase, Ledger, and BitMEX. Blockchain.com, Toncoin, Arbiscan, and DefiLlama also went offline. Other non-crypto platforms like X and ChatGPT faced similar disruptions. This event highlighted the crypto sector’s substantial reliance on centralized web infrastructure. A similar outage at Amazon Web Services occurred just one month prior.

The Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin recently published a “Trustless Manifesto”. Buterin, along with other researchers, warned developers about centralized components. The document stated that each centralized dependency becomes a potential chokepoint. The Cloudflare outage demonstrated this exact vulnerability. 

EthStorage, a project focused on decentralized web hosting, said these events reveal inherent weaknesses in centralized systems. The group argued for more decentralized web infrastructure to avoid single points of failure.

---

Filed under: News - @ November 19, 2025 2:30 pm