Web-infrastructure firm Cloudflare was hit by a global outage on Tuesday (November 18, 2025), leaving major internet platforms inaccessible globally. This is the second major internet disruption this year since the malfunction of Amazon’s cloud services unit AWS in October.
Here are some of the biggest tech outages in recent years, in chronological order:
BRITISH AIRWAYS
IAG-owned British Airways was hit by a major computer system failure in May 2017 that stranded 75,000 passengers over a holiday weekend, sparking a public relations disaster and pledges from the carrier that it would do better in future. According to media reports, the blackout was caused by a maintenance contractor who accidentally switched off power.
ALPHABET
Some of Google’s most popular services, including YouTube, Gmail and Google Drive, were down for an hour during an outage on December 14, 2020. According to outage monitoring website DownDetector, more than 12,000 YouTube users were affected in various parts of the world, including the United States, Britain and India.
FASTLY
In June 2021, thousands of governments, news and social media websites across the globe were hit by a widespread hour-long outage linked to U.S.-based cloud company Fastly. The issue affected several high traffic sites, including Reddit, Amazon, CNN, PayPal, Spotify, Al Jazeera Media Network and the New York Times, with outages ranging from a few minutes to around an hour.
AKAMAI
Websites of dozens of financial institutions and airlines in Australia and the United States were briefly down on June 17, 2021, due to server-related glitches at content delivery network provider Akamai. According to the firm, the problem was caused by a bug in its software.
META
Meta-owned social media platforms Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram went dark for six hours on October 4, 2021, with 10.6 million users reporting problems worldwide. The company said the outage was caused by a faulty configuration change.
X Corp
Social media platform Twitter suffered a major outage on December 28, 2022, leaving tens of thousands of users globally unable to access the popular social media platform or use its key features for several hours before services appeared to come back online. Downdetector tracked more than 10,000 affected users from the United States, about 2,500 from Japan and about 2,500 from the UK at the peak of the disruption.
CROWDSTRIKE
A software update by global cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike triggered systems problems for Microsoft customers that resulted in hours-long global computer systems outages on July 19, 2024.
Services from airlines to healthcare, shipping and finance were impacted globally. After the outage was resolved, companies were left dealing with backlogs of delayed and cancelled flights and medical appointments, missed orders and other issues that took days to solve.
AWS
Amazon’s cloud services unit, which hosts applications and computer processes for companies around the world, was hit by an outage on October 20, 2025, disrupting operations across multiple industries around the world and taking down several popular apps including Reddit and Snapchat.
The disruption knocked workers from London to Tokyo offline and halted others from conducting normal everyday tasks like paying hairdressers or changing their airline tickets. It was at least the third time in five years that AWS’s northern Virginia cluster, known as US-EAST-1, contributed to a major internet meltdown.
CLOUDFARE
The web-infrastructure firm, whose network handles about a fifth of web traffic, was hit by an outage preventing thousands from accessing major internet platforms, including X and ChatGPT, on November 18, 2025. Cloudflare said in a 1148 GMT update it was “experiencing an internal service degradation”. In a 1442 GMT update, it said it had implemented a fix for the underlying issue, adding that “the incident is now resolved”.
Published – November 18, 2025 09:33 pm IST
