On November 18, a global Cloudflare outage disrupted access to numerous websites and online services in Pakistan, affecting major news portals and international platforms before the company applied a fix and restored normal operations. Cloudflare said the issue had been resolved and that teams were monitoring systems to ensure full stability.
The disruption began around 4:10pm Pakistan time, according to user reports on Downdetector. Cloudflare confirmed an internal service degradation at 11:48 UTC that caused widespread “500 Internal Server Errors” and impacted Access, WARP, the Cloudflare dashboard, and the API. The company later said the outage stemmed from a spike in unusual traffic to one of its services, which triggered a latent bug in a component supporting its bot-mitigation system.
In Pakistan, the outage directly affected major news websites, including Geo, Samaa, Dawn, and ARY, making them inaccessible for many users. The failure of Cloudflare’s CAPTCHA and Turnstile security challenges — used by numerous local and international sites — further contributed to service interruptions. Several Pakistan-based users also reported difficulties accessing global platforms such as ChatGPT, OpenAI services, and X, formerly Twitter.
The Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA) said it was closely monitoring the situation and remained in contact with global platforms and local operators until services were restored. NetBlocks, an internet observatory, confirmed that the disruptions originated from Cloudflare’s global network issues and were not related to domestic internet filtering or country-level restrictions.
Cloudflare reported progress throughout the day, stating at 6:09pm that Access and WARP services had recovered and that error levels had returned to normal. At 7:42pm, the company said it believed the incident was resolved but noted that some customers might still face issues logging into the dashboard. Later updates confirmed that all services were operating normally and could be safely re-enabled.
The outage also coincided with thousands of users reporting problems with X in the United States and other countries, though it was unclear whether those disruptions were connected. Cloudflare said it would provide a final update after completing its investigation into the cause of the incident.
