The internet glitched today, November 18, 2025, and millions of people around the world felt it. Websites refused to load, bank apps froze, social media pages went blank.
The problem reportedly started with Cloudflare, one of the biggest companies that keeps the internet running. Dane Knecht, Cloudflare’s chief technology officer, admitted the outage was “unacceptable” and apologised for the disruption. In a post on X, he wrote: “Earlier today we failed our customers and the broader Internet when a problem in @Cloudflarenetwork impacted large amounts of traffic that rely on us… That issue, impact it caused, and time to resolution is unacceptable.” The cause was a latent bug in a service underpinning Cloudflare’s bot mitigation capability, which crashed after a routine configuration change. That single error caused parts of its traffic system to collapse, and because thousands of websites route through Cloudflare, the impact spread instantly across the world.
The disruption was a reminder that the internet is powerful, but also fragile. Today’s glitch is just one example in a long history of small technical mistakes turning into global digital chaos.
Here are five other major internet glitches that shook the world.
The Dyn DNS Attack (2016)
In October 2016, a massive cyberattack hit Dyn, a major DNS provider. Hackers used thousands of infected devices to overwhelm Dyn’s servers. The attack blocked access to big websites like Twitter, Spotify, Reddit, PayPal, and Netflix. Many people thought their Wi-Fi had failed, but the problem was bigger. One company, at the centre of the internet’s addressing system, had been taken down.
2. The Fastly Global Outage (2021)
On 8 June 2021, a user triggered a hidden bug inside Fastly, a large content delivery network. Almost instantly, several major news platforms, government websites, online shops, and social media pages went down. CNN, Amazon, the New York Times, and even parts of the UK government website went offline. The outage lasted less than an hour, but it caused global panic.
3. The Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp Blackout (2021)
On 4 October 2021, Facebook accidentally disconnected itself from the rest of the internet. A faulty update to its BGP routing system removed Facebook’s servers from global access. Instantly, Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Messenger went dark for about six hours. Offices that relied on WhatsApp for communication had to pause tasks. Businesses that sold products through Instagram had no way to reach customers. It was one of the longest outages ever recorded for a single tech giant.
Financially, the outage also hit hard: analysts estimate that Facebook lost between $60 million and nearly $100 million in that short period due to lost ad revenue
4. The Google Services Crash (2020)
In December 2020, several Google services failed at the same time. Gmail, YouTube, Google Drive, and Google Classroom all shut down for users worldwide. The cause was reportedly a storage quota issue that affected Google’s authentication system. People could not sign in to their accounts, even if the apps themselves were fine. Students, remote workers, and offices were stranded for almost an hour.
5. The Starlink Global Outage (2025)
As satellite internet grew more popular, many saw it as a stable alternative to traditional broadband. But on 24 July 2025, Starlink users around the world lost access for more than two hours. A software issue at its ground stations caused the blackout. Homes, remote workers, travellers, and even some vehicles that relied on Starlink for navigation were suddenly offline.
Today’s Cloudflare incident joins this list of digital disruptions. Each event shows how much the modern world depends on a few invisible systems. When they shake, everything shakes with them.
