Cloudflare Outage Exposes Web3’s Centralization Problem
The latest Cloudflare outage caused widespread disruption across crypto applications, demonstrating the sector’s heavy reliance on centralized internet infrastructure. As Cloudflare’s worst service disruption since 2019, the incident exposed a major contradiction within the crypto industry’s claims of decentralization and resilience.
This outage raised difficult questions: Can genuine decentralization exist if a single provider can take down large swaths of the industry?
Scale and Cause of the Cloudflare OutageThe outage began at 11:20 UTC on November 18, following a database permissions change that triggered a failure in Cloudflare’s network. In its official incident report, Cloudflare explained that a bot management feature file had doubled in size, exceeding memory limits and resulting in widespread HTTP 5xx errors.
Core Cloudflare services—including CDN, security, Workers KV, Access authentication, and Dashboard logins—experienced major disruption between roughly 11:20 and 14:30 UTC, with some services partially mitigated from 13:05 and residual issues continuing into the afternoon. All services were fully restored by 17:06 UTC.
The team confirmed that no cyberattack was responsible for the incident. Instead, it stemmed from a configuration change and query behaviour that propagated rapidly through the system.
“Today was Cloudflare’s worst outage since 2019. We’ve had outages that have made our dashboard unavailable. Some that have caused newer features to not be available for a period of time. But in the last 6+ years we’ve not had another outage that has caused the majority of core traffic to stop flowing through our network….On behalf of the entire team at Cloudflare, I would like to apologize for the pain we caused the Internet today,” Matthew Prince, CEO of Cloudflare wrote.
HTTP 5xx Error Spike During the Cloudflare Outage. Source: Cloudflare
Cloudflare plays a significant role in directing global internet traffic, with its infrastructure supporting a wide range of online services. In its “Browser Market Share Report for 2025 Q3,” the company noted that more than 10% of all websites connect through its reverse-proxy system.
Moreover, nearly 25 million online properties depend on Cloudflare’s network to reach their audiences. Because many online platforms rely heavily on their systems, outages or disruptions can have far-reaching consequences.
Crypto’s Decentralization Paradox ExposedNotably, when Cloudflare faltered, major exchanges and DeFi protocols simultaneously went offline.
YIKES!!!
Cloudflare’s global network outage just knocked multiple crypto front-ends offline.
What a chaos!!! pic.twitter.com/pQPbMhjsXj