Major Cloudflare Outage November 18, 2025: Why Thousands of Sites (Including My Music Studio) Are Currently Unreachable

It is just past 8:30 AM Eastern on November 18, 2025, and I am staring at a Cloudflare error page instead of the usual morning flood of messages and notifications I rely on to stay connected with colleagues, students, and parents.

I am far from the only one.

What Is Happening Right Now

Cloudflare, the infrastructure company that protects and accelerates roughly one-fifth of all websites on the internet, is experiencing a severe global degradation that began at 11:48 UTC (6:48 AM ET). The incident is producing:

• Widespread 500-series errors
• Endless “Checking your browser” CAPTCHAs that never resolve
• Complete unavailability of Cloudflare’s own Dashboard and API
• Cascading downtime for thousands of services worldwide, including major platforms that many of us use daily for communication, marketing, and community building

The situation is compounded by scheduled maintenance in multiple US data centers, most notably Los Angeles (LAX) from 10:00–14:00 UTC, which appears to be amplifying the disruption.

Why This Matters to a Small Music Studio

Granby Music Academy teaches violin, viola, mandolin, and mandocello exclusively through our own site (www.granbymusic.com) and Google Meet. My students’ lessons are unaffected today. Yet, like most independent teachers, I depend on several Cloudflare-protected services for:

• Receiving new-student inquiries that originate from social channels
• Sharing practice videos and resources with the wider music community
• Staying in touch with fellow educators and collaborators

When those pipelines suddenly vanish, the ripple effect is real—even if the lesson room itself stays open.

Current Official Status

Cloudflare has identified the issue and is actively mitigating. Partial recovery has been reported for some internal services, but the core edge network remains heavily degraded.

Expected Resolution Timeline (Educated Estimate)

• The worst of the error spike should ease within the next 60–90 minutes (~9:30–10:00 AM ET)
• Los Angeles maintenance concludes at 14:00 UTC (10:00 AM ET), which should help West-Coast routing
• Full or near-full restoration is likely by 11:00 AM–12:00 PM ET, consistent with Cloudflare’s historical 3–5 hour recovery window for comparable global incidents

Today’s lessons will proceed exactly on schedule via Google Meet. This outage is simply an inconvenient reminder of how much of the modern internet runs through a handful of critical providers—and why every independent teacher benefits from having backup communication channels ready.

I’ll update this post once everything is reliably back to normal.