Unbelievable Chaos: Cloudflare’s Global Internet Crash – Was It a Secret AI Experiment?

In an astonishing turn of events, the backbone of the Internet itself—Cloudflare—suffered a massive global outage. Major platforms like X (formerly Twitter), ChatGPT, Canva, and Spotify went dark. The web trembled. Users were left staring at error screens, wondering: what really happened? And some are now whispering that Cloudflare’s own AI-driven systems may have been pushed too far. Was this just a bug … or something more?

What Actually Happened

On 18 November 2025, around 11:20 UTC, Cloudflare’s network began failing to deliver core traffic. As explained in Cloudflare’s own post-mortem, the root cause was not a cyberattack — despite the scale of the outage. The Cloudflare Blog+2Business Today+2

Instead, the failure stemmed from Cloudflare’s Bot Management subsystem, the part of their infrastructure that uses machine learning to distinguish between human users and bots. The Cloudflare Blog+2TechCrunch+2

A recent change in permissions on one of Cloudflare’s internal databases caused that database to generate duplicate rows when producing a “feature file.” The Cloudflare Blog+2Business Today+2 This “feature file” is a configuration input for Cloudflare’s ML-based bot detection — it contains the traits (“features”) that feed into their model. The Cloudflare Blog

Because of the duplication bug, this file doubled in size, growing far beyond what Cloudflare’s proxy systems expected or could safely process. The Cloudflare Blog When that oversized file was deployed across Cloudflare’s network, it caused a crash — the proxy software couldn’t handle it. The Cloudflare Blog

The result? Widespread 5xx HTTP errors for many Cloudflare-powered services, knocking large parts of the internet offline. The Cloudflare Blog

Why People Are Talking About “AI Testing” and a Secret Experiment

Here’s where theory mixes with fear: Cloudflare’s Bot Management relies on a machine learning system — a form of AI — to generate “bot scores.” The Cloudflare Blog Because this outage was triggered by a feature configuration file for that AI model, some people are speculating that Cloudflare was pushing its AI systems too aggressively. What if the feature set was being expanded or experimented with, and the change exposed a fragility in the system?

Crucially, Cloudflare says that the bug wasn’t part of a planned AI experiment gone wrong. According to their blog, the issue began after a routine permissions change in their ClickHouse database, not as part of a secret or unauthorized AI stress test. The Cloudflare Blog Unfortunately, in systems like these, even well-intentioned changes can trigger cascading failures if assumptions are violated.

But Could It Have Been an Attack?

Because so much of the Internet was affected, early speculation included DDoS (distributed denial-of-service) attacks or a malicious campaign — until Cloudflare clarified the real cause. Business Today

Cloudflare’s CTO, Dane Knecht, described the outage as being driven by a “latent bug” — a bug that was dormant, hidden in the system, until a particular change triggered it. TechCrunch+2Business Today+2 In short: no evidence of a hack, just a failure inside their own bot-management engine. АрсТекника

Impact and Response

• Timeline: Cloudflare reported that core traffic was mostly restored by 14:30 UTC, after rolling back to a previous, stable version of the feature file. The Cloudflare Blog
• Systems affected: The crash impacted not only front-end web traffic but also internal systems like Workers KV, Access, and Dashboard, all of which rely on Cloudflare’s proxy infrastructure. The Cloudflare Blog
• Apology: Cloudflare publicly apologized, acknowledging the gravity of the outage and calling it “deeply painful.” The Cloudflare Blog
• Fixes: They reverted to the last-known-good feature file, stopped the propagation of the problematic configuration, and patched their proxy to better handle future feature-file size anomalies. The Cloudflare Blog

Why People Are Worried About AI

1. Fragile AI infrastructure: The incident shows how fragile even “mature” machine learning systems can be — one bad configuration can cascade into a global outage.
2. Aggressive automation: Cloudflare updates its feature file every few minutes to respond to evolving threats. The Cloudflare Blog If testing or experimentation goes wrong, the effects can be devastating.
3. Lack of validation: According to post-incident commentary, Cloudflare did not sufficiently validate the new feature file size or content before pushing it to production. Reddit+1
4. Trust in AI: As more companies rely on ML/AI for critical systems (like security, bot detection, or traffic filtering), this incident raises fundamental questions: how do you sandbox changes? How do you roll back safely if things go bad? What happens if AI mistakes bring down chunks of the internet?

The Bigger Picture: Why This Matters

• Cloudflare is deeply embedded in the internet’s infrastructure: according to their blog, their network handles a huge portion of global web traffic. Widespread Cloudflare
• When a single provider fails, the ripple effects are enormous: major services like ChatGPT, X, and Canva all rely on Cloudflare — meaning an internal bug can translate to real-world user pain.
• This outage is not just a technical glitch. It’s a wake-up call: as AI and ML are increasingly deployed in infrastructure-critical systems, the cost of a misconfiguration or latent code bug is no longer just “a service goes down” — it can be the internet, for us, as users.

The “Conspiracy” Angle: Were They Trying to Hide AI Testing?

There’s no publicly confirmed evidence that Cloudflare intentionally “tested” an AI experiment that went haywire. But conspiracy theories are flying:

• Theory: They were rolling out new AI features, maybe more aggressive or experimental bot-detection traits, and pushed them too quickly.
• Counter: Cloudflare’s explanation is straightforward — a permissions change caused unintentional data duplication, which then broke things. The Cloudflare Blog
• Reality: Whether or not there was “secret testing,” the incident reveals how deeply AI is now integrated into internet infrastructure — and how high the stakes are.

What Cloudflare Promises Going Forward

In its post-incident write-up, Cloudflare pledged to:

• Improve validation of configuration files, especially the “feature file” for its bot-management system. The Cloudflare Blog
• Enhance fallback mechanisms in its proxy software so that future file-size anomalies do not trigger catastrophic crashes. The Cloudflare Blog
• Review its internal deployment processes for ML-related configs, making sure any change is more carefully checked before being distributed to the whole network.

---

Bottom Line: The Cloudflare outage of November 18, 2025, was not a hack — but a real-world example of how AI (or more precisely, ML configuration) can bring the internet to its knees if not handled with extreme caution. What looks like a “crazy AI experiment” might simply have been a human mistake, amplified by automation. But the lesson is fierce and clear: the future of the internet depends not just on powerful AI — but also on safe, resilient systems.