Rubix StudiosRubix Studios
Vincent is the founder and director of Rubix Studios, with over 20 years of experience in branding, marketing, film, photography, and web development. He is a certified partner with industry leaders including Google, Microsoft, AWS, and HubSpot. Vincent also serves as a member of the Maribyrnong City Council Business and Innovation Board and is undertaking an Executive MBA at RMIT University.
A critical segment of global internet infrastructure experienced a major service interruption this week. Cloudflare, the US-based company responsible for shielding millions of websites and applications from malicious activity, reported an unidentified issue that commenced at 10:20 pm AEDT on Tuesday, November 18, 2025.
This event resulted in the display of widespread error messages across various websites utilizing the firm's network services, preventing end-users from accessing specific online properties. Concurrently, technical performance dashboards became inaccessible to several site owners.
Significantly, outage-tracking platforms, including Downdetector itself, were temporarily impacted by the failure, underscoring the pervasive nature of Cloudflare's infrastructure role.
Downdetector, X and Open AI, experienced elevated outage rates corresponding with the Cloudflare incident.
Cloudflare functions as an essential "gatekeeper" and protective layer for internet properties.
Alan Woodward, Professor at the Surrey Centre for Cyber Security, has described the entity as a fundamental element of internet operations that is frequently unseen by the public. Its principal services are designed to protect web properties, application programming interfaces (APIs), and artificial intelligence workloads while simultaneously accelerating content delivery performance globally.
A core defensive capability involves monitoring traffic to shield against Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks, where malicious actors attempt to overwhelm a service with an unmanageable flood of internet requests, thereby disrupting legitimate user access.
Cloudflare provides crucial checks to authenticate users as human, mitigating automated threats.
"I won’t mince words: earlier today we failed our customers and the broader Internet when a problem in network impacted large amounts of traffic that rely on us. The sites, businesses, and organizations that rely on Cloudflare depend on us being available and I apologize for the impact that we caused.
Transparency about what happened matters, and we plan to share a breakdown with more details in a few hours. In short, 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 to our network and other services. This was not an attack.
That issue, impact it caused, and time to resolution is unacceptable. Work is already underway to make sure it does not happen again, but I know it caused real pain today. The trust our customers place in us is what we value the most and we are going to do what it takes to earn that back."
The preliminary technical analysis points to an anomaly within the network traffic itself. According to official communications, the issue originated from a "spike in unusual traffic" directed toward one of Cloudflare’s specific services, which subsequently caused traffic flowing through the network to encounter elevated error rates.
Although remediation efforts are ongoing, the company stated that while services are recovering, customers might still observe higher-than-normal error rates. As of 11:21 pm AEDT, the immediate focus remained on ensuring all traffic is served without errors before diverting resources toward a full-scale investigation into the root cause of the unusual traffic spike.
Given the massive scale and distributed architecture of the service, industry counsel suggests the outage is unlikely to have been caused by a cyber-attack exploiting a single point of failure.
This widespread disruption highlights the escalating systemic risk inherent in the internet's infrastructure concentration.
The fragility resulting from reliance on a small number of providers was previously evidenced by the Amazon Web Services (AWS) outage that occurred less than a month prior, affecting thousands of sites globally.
From a risk management and regulatory compliance perspective, these events underscore the exposure to business continuity threats and potential Service Level Agreement (SLA) breaches when a critical third-party provider experiences failure.
Industry experts, emphasize that the small number of companies providing this critical infrastructure means that a single failure quickly becomes noticeable and impactful across the globe, necessitating greater focus on redundancy planning.
Rubix Studios recommends proactive monitoring and clear communication during periods of third-party service degradation. Brand coordination dictates that transparency is paramount when client accessibility is compromised due to external events. Web engineering principles mandate continuous review of application architecture to ensure appropriate levels of resilience are implemented, potentially leveraging multiple content delivery networks or origin servers to mitigate reliance on a single provider.
The current incident reinforces the strategic value of incorporating geographically and architecturally diverse service providers to safeguard against concentration risk and maintain consistent user experience.
The Cloudflare outage serves as a critical reminder of the complexities of global web infrastructure. While the company is actively restoring full service and investigating the anomaly, businesses must prioritize architectural redundancy and clear contingency planning. Rubix Studios remains committed to advising clients on implementing resilient infrastructure strategies to minimize future impact from external service disruptions.
Vincent is the founder and director of Rubix Studios, with over 20 years of experience in branding, marketing, film, photography, and web development. He is a certified partner with industry leaders including Google, Microsoft, AWS, and HubSpot. Vincent also serves as a member of the Maribyrnong City Council Business and Innovation Board and is undertaking an Executive MBA at RMIT University.