Cloudfare Takes Down The Internet—Here’s an Alternative

On November 18, 2025, Cloudflare suffered its worst outage since 2019. For roughly five hours the service went dark, taking virtually every one of its customers offline. At first, the company even suspected a hack. Below is what happened, why it matters, and one way to avoid being caught in the next cascade.

What is Cloudflare?

Cloudflare acts as an “edge network” that sits between websites and their visitors. Because visitors can come from all over the world, it’s faster for them to hit Cloudflare’s edge network, hosted on 330 different servers (edge nodes) throughout the world.

This edge network improves performance by pulling cached assets (code, images, and videos) closer to the website’s visitor. It also provides security by performing analysis of the incoming requests and volume, dropping attacks before they reach the website.

This is why you see those “Checking if you’re a bot” messages on many websites today. In fact, because of these capabilities, about 18 percent of all websites are behind Cloudflare’s edge network, and roughly a quarter of global internet traffic passes through Cloudflare’s infrastructure.

The November 18 Outage

When Cloudflare failed, it failed hard—taking down some of the most popular websites and services on the internet including:

• Canva
• CharacterAI
• ChatGPT & ClaudeAI
• IKEA
• Spotify
• Truth Social
• Uber
• X (formerly Twitter)
• Zoom

The company traced the failure to a bug in its Bot Management module. Every request that passes through Cloudflare’s core proxy is scored for “bot‑likeness.” A recent change to the distributed database caused the module to pull extra data, exhausting its memory and bringing the whole network to a halt.

During this time period of about five hours, Cloudflare was receiving 26M error responses a second, close to all of its traffic. This shows you the massive reach of its network and how bad the outage was—the worst since 2019.

A Single Source of Failure

Cloudflare markets itself as a defender of an open Internet—protecting governments, NGOs, and businesses from DDoS attacks. Yet centralization in its hands is harmful to the internet and online privacy.

1. Single‑point failure—With roughly 20 % of the web sitting on Cloudflare, a glitch of this size can severely impact the internet.
2. Online-fingerprinting—Cloudflare’s ability to identify traffic gives it the ability to track people across the web.
3. Arbitrary takedowns—CEO Matthew Prince has admitted to removing sites on a whim—once saying he “woke up in a bad mood and decided to kick them off the Internet.” (Ars Technica, 2017)
4. Violating sanctions laws—Despite U.S. sanctions on groups such as the Taliban, Cloudflare has continued providing services to them.

Point four alone should illustrate how much power Cloudflare has, wielding influence that rivals, or even exceeds, that of governments—but without the same public oversight. Or perhaps it is useful for Cloudflare to monitor who is visiting these sanctioned organizations.

A Practical Alternative: Anubis

If your website needs protection from bots and DDoS attacks without relying on a single, centralized provider, consider Anubis, a web firewall that operates as a reverse proxy. Its key features:

• Proof‑of‑Work challenges—Incoming browsers solve tiny computational puzzles (similar to Bitcoin mining) before the request reaches your server. This raises the cost for automated botnets while keeping the friction low for real users.
• AI‑driven analysis—Requests are evaluated in real-time, allowing legitimate traffic through while flagging malicious patterns.

Anubis has already helped sites survive large‑scale attacks.

The Bottom Line

Cloudflare’s outage was a wake‑up call: relying on a single, massive edge network makes the Internet brittle. We should invest our time and attention on solutions like Anubis, which work without requiring a third party or by monitoring people across the internet.

This is a segment from #TBOT Show Episode 18. Watch the full episode here.

🛍️ Above’s Black Friday Sale is Back!
Our best sale of the year is back—with some phones up to $500 off, plus deals on laptops and bundles.

If you’re ready to upgrade your privacy gear, now is the best time.

Don’t wait—supplies of our most popular devices are extremely limited!