On November 18, 2025, many people woke up, opened ChatGPT like they always do… and got nothing but error pages. If you saw Cloudflare or 500 errors instead of answers, you weren’t alone. This wasn’t just “ChatGPT being buggy” — it was part of a major internet-wide outage. Here’s a clear, non-technical breakdown of why ChatGPT was down and when it was restored , plus what actually happened behind the scenes. 1. What actually happened? On November 18, 2025 , a major outage at Cloudflare — a huge internet infrastructure company — caused parts of the web to effectively “disappear” for many users. Because OpenAI (ChatGPT) and many other services sit on top of Cloudflare’s network, when Cloudflare started failing, people around the world saw: “500 Internal Server Error” pages Cloudflare-branded error screens Timeouts or pages that wouldn’t load at all This outage impacted a long l...
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