Cloudflare Outage (Nov 18, 2025): 'challenges.cloudflare.com' Error Explained

Major Internet Outage Hits Global Services on Nov 18, 2025

Wondering why you saw a "challenges.cloudflare.com" error and couldn't access half the internet on November 18, 2025? You've come to the right place. Here is a complete breakdown of the massive Cloudflare and AWS outage.

Table of Contents

Outage Summary: What Went Down?

On November 18, 2025, a cascading failure across several core internet services created widespread disruption. Key services impacted include:

  • Cloudflare: Suffered a severe degradation across its global network, causing countless dependent websites to go down or become unstable.
  • X (formerly Twitter): Experienced repeated outages and instability across the US and other global regions, widely believed to be a direct result of the Cloudflare failure.
  • Amazon Web Services (AWS): Reported a surge in traffic and intermittent service paralysis, compounding the issues from other platforms.
  • Other Platforms: Numerous other services, including financial, gaming, and shopping websites, also reported downtime and connectivity issues.

Root Cause Analysis: A Double Failure

This large-scale outage was triggered by critical failures at two major infrastructure providers, creating a perfect storm of internet instability.

Service Core Cause and Analysis
Cloudflare The issue is attributed to excessive traffic or an internal configuration error.
  • Cloudflare officially stated the cause could be "too much traffic or a configuration error," leading to widespread HTTP 500 server errors.
  • The failure may have been triggered by a recent configuration change or traffic congestion resulting from maintenance at a data center.
AWS A DNS (Domain Name System) resolution failure was the primary cause.
  • AWS's internal system for translating domain names into server IP addresses failed, paralyzing traffic routing.
  • This led to connection failures for its core DynamoDB database service, causing a domino effect that took down other key services like EC2 and Lambda.

What is the "challenges.cloudflare.com" Error?

The message "To continue, please unblock challenges.cloudflare.com" appears when Cloudflare's anti-bot system fails. Due to the outage, the server cannot properly verify whether a user is a human or a bot, causing it to get stuck in an endless verification loop.

Current Status and Future Outlook

Engineers at both Cloudflare and AWS are actively working on recovery. While some services are slowly being restored, error rates remain high, and full stability may take more time. This event highlights the global internet's heavy reliance on a small number of major infrastructure providers and underscores the critical importance of robust DNS architecture and traffic management.

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