Cloudflare server issues took down many major Nepali blogs and websites, and those abroad, on November 18, 2025. The company says that it’s working on restoration, and many platforms are also working normally now. But during the outage, many online platforms such as Onlinekhabar, ChatGPT, Canva, X, etc. suffered from complete disruption or inconsistency, affecting millions of users worldwide.
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What is Cloudflare, and what does it do?
If you are unaware, Cloudflare is a content delivery network (CDN) that serves as a cloud that makes websites and apps faster and secure as it routes internet traffic through its global network. Although network outages can be common, issues at global service providers such as Cloudflare affect online services globally.
Many online platforms use it for secure operation. It makes platforms work snappier by caching content and hosting it on different servers placed strategically. Therefore, when users access a website or an app, they access it fast because they get cached content through the closest Cloudflare server.
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Cloudflare server issue disrupts sites globally
Websites and blogs that were affected by the Cloudflare server issue were met with an Internal server error. The globally popular ChatGPT.com also showed “Please unblock challenges.cloudflare.com to proceed.” Altogether, 7.5 million websites were affected by this outage. However, as I am writing this article, the AI chatbot is back and running well now.
During the outage, many Nepali online news platforms, such as Onlinekhabar, Ratopati, and many tech blogs, suffered, including nepalitelecom.com.
Thankfully, sites are working normally again.
After the massive outage hit globally, Cloudflare acknowledged the issue and said that it was working on measures.
“Cloudflare is aware of and investigating an issue that potentially impacts multiple customers. Further details will be provided as more information becomes available,” the company said in its status page. The same page has mentioned updated schedules for Miami, Los Angeles, Chicago, etc. There are no indications that these updates were causing the massive outage.
A few days ago, an AWS outage barred millions of people from accessing the online services. Now, Cloudflare did the same. But thankfully, there doesn’t seem to be any hacking attempts or unauthorized infiltration behind the issue.
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So, what caused the Cloudflare outage on such a massive scale?
Cloudflare CTO Dane Knecht has shared that the malfunction in its bot mitigation caused the outage. He said, “A latent bug in a service underpinning our bot mitigation capability started to crash after a routine configuration change we made. That cascaded into a broad degradation of our network and other services.”
He said that the company will share more details very soon and clarified that it was not an attack.
Cloudflare resuming, finally!
Cloudflare seems to be back now, though gradually. As a result, many online platforms are now working again. Canva, ChatGPT, and Nepali sites are working normally.
If you were worried about the possibility of a hacking attempt on the website or blog you were trying to access, don’t bother. It was a server issue from Cloudflare, and the necessary measures have been implemented. Now, all the online services shall come back online very soon.
