If your VPN, online tools like Magic Eraser, and X (formerly Twitter) all started glitching or refusing to load today, you’re not alone.
On 18 November 2025, a major Cloudflare outage disrupted huge parts of the internet, affecting services like ChatGPT, X, League of Legends, Downdetector and many more.
Because so many apps and websites rely on Cloudflare’s network for security, DNS and content delivery, when Cloudflare has a problem, it feels like “the whole internet is broken.”
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What Exactly Happened Today?
According to multiple reports and Cloudflare’s own status updates:
• Around late morning UTC on 18 Nov 2025, Cloudflare started seeing a spike in unusual traffic.
• This triggered internal service degradation and 500-type error messages (“internal server error”) across many of its services.
• Big platforms including X, ChatGPT, League of Legends and even Downdetector were affected, with users suddenly unable to load pages or log in.
• Cloudflare temporarily disabled or limited some services (like WARP in London) to stabilise the network, then slowly started recovery.
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Cloudflare has described the incident as “internal service degradation” caused by unusual traffic, not confirmed as a hack or DDoS at this stage.
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Why Your VPN Isn’t Working
There are two main reasons VPNs can fail during a Cloudflare incident:
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1. Cloudflare’s Own VPN (WARP) and related services
Cloudflare offers its own consumer VPN-style product called WARP (via the 1.1.1.1 app). When Cloudflare’s network is unstable:
• WARP connections can drop,
• routing can break,
• or the client simply refuses to connect in certain regions.
During today’s outage, Cloudflare explicitly mentioned issues with Access and WARP, and even disabled WARP in London temporarily to reduce impact.
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If you’re using 1.1.1.1/WARP, this explains why your “VPN” suddenly stopped working or kept reconnecting.
2. Other VPNs that rely on Cloudflare
Even if you use a different VPN brand, you might still be hit indirectly:
• Many VPN providers use Cloudflare’s DNS and security services.
• Their websites, APIs, payment pages, or login back-ends could be behind Cloudflare.
• When Cloudflare returns 500 Internal Server Error or similar, your VPN app may fail to fetch configs, authenticate, or resolve domains.
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Result:
You tap “Connect” → it spins → nothing happens or you get generic “connection failed” messages.
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Why “Magic Eraser” Stopped Working
By Magic Eraser, many users mean an online AI tool that removes backgrounds or objects from photos (there are several sites with that name / function).
Most of these tools:
• run on cloud infrastructure, and
• sit behind Cloudflare for DDoS protection, caching, HTTPS, etc.
So when Cloudflare is having a bad day:
• The site won’t load at all, or
• you see a Cloudflare-branded error page (500, 502, “Internal server error”, or “Cloudflare encountered an error processing this request”).
In short: the AI tool itself might be fine, but its gateway to the public internet (Cloudflare) is broken, so you can’t reach it.
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Why X (Formerly Twitter) Is Down Again
Today, X (formerly Twitter) also suffered a global outage, with users in multiple countries unable to load timelines, post tweets, or even open the site properly.
Reports and outage maps show:
• Huge spikes of error reports for X around the same time as the Cloudflare incident.
• Users seeing error pages, partial loading, or blank timelines instead of normal content.
Cloudflare is a key provider of DDoS protection and traffic handling for many large platforms. So when Cloudflare’s network started failing, parts of X’s traffic path were also affected, causing:
• Failed page loads
• API calls timing out
• Intermittent access (works for some users, fails for others)
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This incident sits on top of earlier X outages in 2025 that were caused by its own data-center and infrastructure issues – so for users it just feels like “Twitter is always broken.”
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Is This a Cyberattack?
Right now, there is no confirmed evidence that today’s Cloudflare outage is a cyberattack:
• Cloudflare has talked about “unusual traffic” and service degradation.
• Security experts quoted in coverage say a deliberate attack is possible but unlikely, given Cloudflare’s resilient design, and that misconfigurations or internal issues are often more common causes.
Until Cloudflare publishes a detailed post-incident report, all we can say is:
it appears to be an internal / traffic-handling problem, not confirmed hacking.
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What You Can Do As a Normal User
While Cloudflare and X engineers work on the back end, you can try a few things on your side:
1. Don’t panic about your own Wi-Fi
• If multiple big sites are failing at the same time, the issue is almost certainly not your router.
2. Test a few completely different sites
• If Google, YouTube, or some local news site loads fine, but tools like ChatGPT, Magic Eraser, or X don’t, that points to a service-side / Cloudflare issue, not your connection.
3. Try switching VPN off/on
• When Cloudflare or WARP is unstable, temporarily turn VPN off and test again.
• If you must use a VPN, try a different protocol/server that might not route via Cloudflare.
4. Check an outage tracker
• Sites like Downdetector or local outage maps can confirm if others are also reporting the same problem.
5. Avoid constant logins and password resets
• When apps are unstable, repeated login attempts may look suspicious and can even lock your account.
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What Website Owners / Devs Should Watch Right Now
If you run a website or SaaS that uses Cloudflare:
• Monitor the Cloudflare Status page and Radar Outage Center closely.
• Expect intermittent 5xx errors, especially on APIs, Access, and WARP-dependent flows.
• Prepare a simple fallback status page (even hosted on a different provider) to communicate with your users.
• Long term, consider multi-CDN or backup DNS so that a single provider outage doesn’t completely take you offline.
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The Bigger Picture: One Company, Huge Impact
This outage shows how much of the modern internet runs through a few giants:
• Cloudflare powers security, DNS, and performance for over 20% of global websites, including some of the world’s biggest platforms.
• When it breaks, VPNs, AI tools, social networks, game servers, payment pages – everything can start failing at once.
So if today your VPN, Magic Eraser, and X all refused to work,
the real problem wasn’t you.
It was a single critical infrastructure provider stumbling – and taking a big slice of the internet down with it.
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