Cloudflare carnage as bet365 rained off for half the day
Summary
Major outage hit large parts of the internet on 18 November 2025 after Cloudflare experienced a substantial service degradation following a routine configuration change. High-profile sites including bet365, X and ChatGPT showed errors from around 11:00–11:20am GMT, with Cloudflare reporting a spike in unusual traffic and later confirming an internal degradation. The firm implemented a fix at 14:42 but warned some issues remained. Cloudflare’s CTO, Dane Knecht, said the incident was not an attack and apologised for the disruption.
Bet365 — which states it has over 100 million customers — was offline for several hours on web and mobile, disrupting sports betting and iGaming services during Davis Cup tennis and multiple racing meetings. The outage highlights the commercial and operational risks of heavy reliance on third-party internet infrastructure providers.
Key Points
- Outage began with user reports to Downdetector around 11:00am GMT; Cloudflare detected unusual traffic from 11:20am.
- Users encountered error messages and prompts to “unblock cloudflare.com”; many services experienced intermittent failures.
- Cloudflare labelled the event an internal service degradation caused by a routine configuration change that cascaded across its network; it denied any attack.
- A fix was deployed at 14:42 but Cloudflare warned that several post-deployment issues still required mitigation.
- Bet365 likely suffered revenue and customer-impact from the roughly three-hour disruption; the incident underlines businesses’ exposure when critical routing/security relies on a single provider.
Context and relevance
This follows earlier major internet outages (eg. the AWS failure in October) and sits within an ongoing pattern where a small number of infrastructure providers underpin a large share of web traffic. Around one in five websites use Cloudflare in some form, so failures can cascade across sectors — from social media and AI services to sportsbooks and banking. For iGaming operators and other online businesses, the event is a stark reminder to test redundancy, incident playbooks and vendor risk management.
Why should I read this?
Quick and dirty: if you run or rely on online services, this matters. A routine change at a major provider knocked out big-name sites for hours and cost firms time, trust and likely revenue. Read this to see how the problem unfolded, the public admission from Cloudflare’s CTO, and why you should care about backup plans and supplier risk — before it’s your turn to be rained off.
Source
Source: https://igamingexpert.com/features/cloudflare-storms-bet365-internet-halts/
