Cloudflare Outage Disrupts Online Services, Hits Wake County 911 Website

Internet infrastructure provider Cloudflare experienced an outage on November 18, 2025 that caused widespread 500 server errors and disrupted the company Dashboard and API, the company reported as it investigated the root cause. Major customer platforms including X, several multiplayer games and ChatGPT were among those affected, and recovery was reported to be underway while engineers continued their probe.

Locally, the outage reached Wake County when the Raleigh Wake 911 website went offline for a period. The temporary loss of the county 911 website removed an online channel residents use for information and resources, particularly during crises or service changes. While traditional emergency call lines are separate systems, the website outage highlighted how local governments increasingly depend on external cloud and content delivery services for public communication and operations.

Cloudflare noted that it had scheduled maintenance that day for its SCL Santiago data center and said it was looking into whether the maintenance was linked to the incident. The company did not provide a final determination before reporting recovery activity, leaving questions about configuration, capacity and failover behavior in play. The outage produced visible 500 errors for end users, a common server response that signals internal failures rather than device level problems.

From a market perspective this event reinforces the economic significance of a small number of firms that provide backbone internet services. Interruptions at major providers can ripple through e commerce, media, entertainment and communications, creating lost revenue, customer frustration and reputational damage for downstream firms. For local businesses in Wake County that use Cloudflare or similar services to secure and accelerate websites, even brief outages can interrupt transactions, bookings and customer support.

Policy implications are immediate for municipal and county officials. The outage underlines the need for redundancy in public facing systems, clearer continuity plans that do not rely solely on a single third party, and regular testing of fallback channels for emergency information. It also adds to long term regulatory and industry debates about concentration risk in internet infrastructure and the balance between efficiency gains from consolidation and resilience needs.

For residents the episode is a reminder to have multiple ways to receive critical information. For public administrators it is a prompt to review contracts and contingency protocols. Cloud infrastructure failures are likely to remain a recurring challenge as more services move online, making investments in resilience a local government budgetary and planning priority going forward.