• Cloudflare outage affected numerous major websites including X (formerly Twitter) and ChatGPT.
• The incident began around 6:00 AM ET and was identified as a result of a configuration issue.
• Downdetector reported thousands of user complaints related to access failures.
• Cloudflare confirmed it was investigating the issue which caused widespread service disruptions.
• Most services began to recover after the outage was resolved by the afternoon.

A significant outage at Cloudflare, an essential internet infrastructure company, disrupted access to several major platforms including X (formerly Twitter), OpenAI's ChatGPT, and Spotify on November 18. Reports of the outage, which began around 6:00 AM ET, quickly spread as users faced difficulties connecting to these services across the globe, according to Indiatimes and BBC.

The disruption originated from issues with Cloudflare’s internal systems related to a configuration that triggered a broad degradation of its services. The company's public status page also indicated that it was aware of and investigating the situation, which left users unable to access various websites, culminating in thousands of outage reports submitted to tracking site Downdetector, as cited by Indiatimes and Channel News Asia.

Users experienced widespread errors, including HTTP 500 and 502 messages, suggesting severe backend issues on affected sites. Some major platforms like Uber Eats and Discord were also reported to be down during this period, highlighting how crucial Cloudflare's services are for internet functionality, according to South China Morning Post and Indiatimes.

The onset of the outage was determined to be related to a “latent bug” that caused excessive load on Cloudflare's systems. The scalability issues led to cascading failures as widespread connectivity was hampered until Cloudflare implemented fixes, restoring services gradually throughout the day. This was confirmed via updates from the company, reported by Indiatimes and Indiatimes.

By early afternoon, most services had returned online. However, Cloudflare continued to monitor performance and address minor remaining issues indicated through their status page, which affirmed steps were being taken to avoid future occurrences, as noted by Indiatimes and Dawn.