Major Cloudflare outage is affecting Substack, X, ChatGPT, and more

If your favorite website is down, here's why

• ☁️ Cloudflare is experiencing a major outage

• 🖥️ This time, it’s affecting large sites like Substack, X, and even ChatGPT

• 📈 A large traffic spike on a mysterious website is to blame

• 🧑‍💻 Cloudflare says it’s working to resolve the issue

If you’re like us and can’t seem to use Substack or its content management system this morning, you’re not alone. Cloudflare, which provides DDoS protection for a vast amount of websites and web-based services across the internet, has been experiencing a major outage all morning. The issue has been affecting not just Substack but social network X, ChatGPT, DownDetector (ironically enough), NJ Transit, and more.

Cloudflare’s status page on its website says that it knows of an issue and is working to resolve it, which is good news. A spokesperson for the company told The Verge that the problem stems from a spike in unusual traffic to one of the services that Cloudflare protects. It’s unclear which service that is, but the company noted that it’ll also investigate where the traffic came from once the issue is revoled.

Other platforms that have been reported to be failing include Spotify, Uber, Canva, Grindr, and League of Legends. If you notice any other website not working properly, drop a comment below and let us know to bring awareness.

Update 11/18/25 11:30 AM EST: Cloudflare says that while it did deploy a fix, later status updates confirmed that not everything is peachy just yet. Intermittent errors are still being reported, while latency continues to see improvement after this morning’s crash-out.

(Screenshot: Max Buondonno / The Shortcut)

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Max Buondonno is an editor at The Shortcut. He’s been reporting on the latest consumer technology since 2015, with his work featured on CNN Underscored, ZDNET, How-To Geek, XDA, TheStreet, and more. Follow him on X @LegendaryScoop and Instagram @LegendaryScoop.