Cloudflare: Reason for global outage crippling X, ChatGPT, Nigerian websites

United States-based firm, Cloudflare has explained the reason for its Tuesday, November 18, 2025, global outage, which crippled X and ChatGPT, including Nigerian news websites such as Channels Television, Trendynobs.

The company spokesperson disclosed this in a statement on Tuesday.

In an update, the firm said it had fixed the glitch hours after the global outage, which put its customers in a fix.

A spokesperson said, “A fix has been implemented, and we believe the incident is now resolved. We are continuing to monitor for errors to ensure all services are back to normal.”

The spokesperson for Cloudflare apologised to its customers “and the internet in general for letting you down today.”

They said, “We will learn from today’s incident and improve.”

Reason for outage

The company, however, ruled out an external attack as the reason for the outage, saying it “was a configuration file that is automatically generated to manage threat traffic”.

A Cloudflare spokesperson stressed that “to be clear, there is no evidence that this was the result of an attack or caused by malicious activity.”

The company said the outage happened around 12:20 pm but normal returned around 3:30 pm Nigerian time.