Cloudflare Outage Disrupts Major Websites Worldwide and Affects Mauritian Businesses

Internet infrastructure provider Cloudflare experienced a major outage on 18 November 2025, starting at around 11:20 UTC. The disruption caused many websites and online services worldwide to become temporarily inaccessible.

Cloudflare confirmed that the outage was not caused by a cyber attack or malicious activity. It was triggered by an internal configuration issue that affected its network systems, causing widespread service interruptions.

The company acted quickly to resolve the problem, and most services were restored within a few hours. Cloudflare acknowledged the seriousness of the incident and apologized for the disruption, highlighting the critical role its network plays in supporting a large portion of the internet.

What’s a Cloudflare?

Cloudflare is a company that helps websites load faster, stay online, and stay safe from attacks. Think of it as a combination of a security guard and traffic manager for the internet.

Why it’s important:

1. Content Delivery Network (CDN): Cloudflare stores copies of website content on servers around the world, so when someone visits a site, the content can be delivered from a nearby location. This helps handle large amounts of traffic efficiently.

2. Security: Cloudflare protects websites from hackers, bots, and attacks that try to overload the site with traffic.

3. Reliability: It helps websites stay online even if the hosting servers have problems.

4. Scale: Cloudflare manages traffic for a huge portion of the internet ( roughly 20% ), making it one of the few companies that can combine speed, security, and global reach in one service.

In short, Cloudflare makes websites faster, safer, and more reliable. Because their network is so big, outages can affect thousands of websites worldwide, including businesses in Mauritius.

You can learn more about them and their products here.

Our Experience Managing the Outage From Mauritius

Around noon Mauritius time, we started noticing that some of our client websites using Cloudflare were not accessible. Since we are based in Mauritius, the Cloudflare node in Port Louis appeared down.

At first, we thought it might be a local connectivity issue. However, after testing through a VPN, it became clear that the outage was affecting websites globally, not just locally. We also checked on social media platforms such as X ( previously called Twitter ) and found out that other users were experiencing it. We also found this meme we thought would be funny to include here.

We received some complaints from clients, but this situation was beyond our control. We did make an announcement about it on our social media pages including X, Facebook, LinkedIn and Mastodon. Unfortunately, there are very few alternatives to Cloudflare that provide the same combination of services. The other options are either much more expensive or significantly more complex to integrate. This is a reality for many businesses and enterprises in Mauritius that depend on Cloudflare for website performance, security, and uptime.

Should businesses continue to use Cloudflare? For most, yes. Cloudflare is easy to use and provides practical features like DNS management and their APO tool for WordPress, which has genuinely improved performance for client websites using WooCommerce or WordPress. However, it is possible to operate without Cloudflare. Some clients run their websites without it and have not experienced issues. Outages like this are rare, and Cloudflare typically resolves them quickly.

Impact on Mauritian Businesses

Several Mauritian websites and online services experienced accessibility issues during the outage. These included media platforms, technology companies and various other businesses that rely on Cloudflare for performance, security and uptime. While we don’t have an exact number, we believe the number to be a few hundred sites. The incident highlighted how dependent Mauritian organisations have become on global infrastructure providers to maintain online continuity.

References

• Cloudflare Blog. 18 November 2025 Outage Post-Mortem.
  https://blog.cloudflare.com/18-november-2025-outage/