Cloudflare’s global outage on Tuesday (Nov. 18) caused widespread service disruption — and sparked a flood of memes on the few platforms that came back online. When X (formerly Twitter), ChatGPT, Canva, League of Legends, and even Downdetector went down, users jumped back on X as it partially recovered and turned to humor to cope with the chaos.
Memes fill the void
Even after Cloudflare announced it had identified the root cause and services were slowly coming back online, the memes continued to flow — transforming a massive technical glitch into a global moment of comic relief.
With major platforms unavailable, users have turned to their default coping mechanism during the online crisis – creating memes. Blank screens and frozen dashboards quickly gave way to a wave of jokes on X about “internet crashing”.
If anything, the outage underscored one truth: when the internet goes down, only memes grow.
The most shared posts included:
“Twitter is down… but our memes are still live!”
“Cloudflare down…touch the grass, watch the clouds.”
“Cloudflare went down globally for a few minutes and… everyone lost their minds.
A popular gag depicting a nervous employee: “First day at Cloudflare, brought a small update and took the afternoon off.”
Another meme summed up the chaos:
Jokes about engineers
The outage also prompted jokes about Cloudflare engineers trying to fix the problem, with one meme reading: “Engineers at Cloudflare trying to fix the problem as”.
Another viral thread highlighted the irony of Cloudflare and X going down: “AWS went down → a flood of memes on X → Cloudflare went down → let’s post some memes on X → something is wrong on X too.”
Some users poked fun at those who spent the day creating content: “Unemployable making memes about Cloudflare that don’t work all day today:” accompanied by reaction clips mocking the obsessive meme-posting culture.
Global internet outage hits major platforms
A massive internet outage disrupted major digital platforms around the world on Tuesday, leaving millions unable to access services including X (formerly Twitter), ChatGPT OpenAI, Perplexity AI, Google Cloud, Canva, League of Legends and Valorant.
The breach was traced to a critical network failure at Cloudflare, the web infrastructure giant that supports a significant portion of global Internet traffic.
Cloudflare’s system status page confirmed the incident early Tuesday, warning of “degradation of internal services” and a “global network issue” that caused widespread API and dashboard failures. “Some services may be affected at times. We are focusing on restoring services,” the company said, promising continuous updates.
A global reminder of Cloudflare’s reach
Cloudflare’s systems are used by hundreds of thousands of companies around the world to secure and speed up their websites, making the outage one of the most devastating in years. The incident underscored how deeply embedded the company’s infrastructure is across sectors — from social media and artificial intelligence to financial services and public transportation.
As Cloudflare continues its recovery efforts, users around the world are gradually regaining access – although many platforms are still experiencing delays, errors and partial functionality.
Read also | What went wrong with Cloudflare? Is it fixed yet?
