Major Cloudflare Outage Disrupts Access to X, ChatGPT and Other Major Online Platforms

A major outage at Cloudflare, one of the world’s biggest internet infrastructure providers, has disrupted access to several global platforms, with Zimbabwean users also feeling the impact. Popular services such as X (formerly Twitter), ChatGPT, Claude AI and many others have been intermittently unavailable since around 2:00PM Zimbabwe time on 18 November 2025.

Locally, users reported sudden “internal server error” messages when trying to open their favourite sites, including platforms used daily for work, communication, and entertainment. Some Zimbabwean websites that use Cloudflare for security and performance also loaded slowly or failed completely.

Cloudflare confirmed the incident on its official status page, saying:
“Cloudflare is aware of, and investigating an issue which potentially impacts multiple customers. Further detail will be provided as more information becomes available.”

Global Outage Felt Here at Home

The disruption affected a wide range of websites that rely on Cloudflare’s network for content delivery, cyber-protection, and uptime stability. Among the platforms Zimbabweans struggled to access were - X (twitter), Chatgpt, Claude and many others.

Even outage-tracking services like Down Detector commonly used to check whether platforms are down also experienced instability during the same period.

For many local businesses and creatives, the outage briefly stalled online communication, digital marketing efforts, and AI-assisted work sessions; a reminder of how dependent Zimbabwe’s digital ecosystem has become on global infrastructure providers.

Why Cloudflare Matters

Cloudflare sits quietly behind the scenes of millions of websites, including many used daily in Zimbabwe. It works as:

• A Content Delivery Network (CDN): speeding up websites by caching content in data centres around the world.

• A Security Layer: protecting websites from cyberattacks like DDoS attacks that can shut down services.

• A Performance Optimiser: ensuring faster load times and reduced downtime.

Because Cloudflare is deeply woven into the backbone of the modern internet, even a partial disruption can ripple across the globe taking down unrelated services at once.

This incident mirrors other large-scale outages, such as the Amazon Web Services (AWS) breakdown seen recently, and it highlights the vulnerabilities of a centralised internet where a single provider’s issue can affect millions of users across continents, including Zimbabwe.

Still Under Investigation

As of writing, Cloudflare is still working to identify the root cause of the outage and has not provided a timeline for full restoration.

We will continue monitoring the situation and update readers as soon as new information becomes available.