When the Internet's Bouncer Takes a Break: Thoughts on the Cloudflare Outage

👋 Moin!

Did you try to ask ChatGPT for a quick Excel formula today, switch a playlist on Spotify, or finish a design in Canva, and all you got was a “500 Internal Server Error”?

You were not alone.

Today around midday (18.11.2025), one of the most important pillars of the internet was briefly knocked off its feet: Cloudflare. When services like OpenAI, X (Twitter) or even Downdetector (the site that is supposed to tell us what is broken) become unreachable, we realize how centralized our network really is in some places.

What happened?

Shortly before 1:00 pm our time, the lights went out worldwide for many services. The cause was a disruption in Cloudflare's global network. To put it simply: Cloudflare is like the bouncer and the traffic cop for millions of websites at the same time. They protect against attacks and make sure data reaches you quickly.

But when this traffic cop is stuck in a traffic jam himself (or, as today, has technical problems with maintenance and routing), nobody gets through. The result: half the internet felt like a ghost town.

Why this matters to us at Pixel & Process

We often preach independence and data sovereignty. That is why we rely heavily on open-source solutions with full data control such as n8n or Mautic, which we can control on our own servers (e.g. with German hosts like Hetzner).

But: we and many of our customers also use services like Cloudflare for security and performance. Today's event is an important "reality check". It shows that in digital business there is no 100% guarantee, not even with the very big players.

What you can learn from this (without panicking) You do not need to rebuild your entire infrastructure now. Cloudflare does a great job. But here are three things we advise our customers to do:

Know your dependencies: Do you know which tools in your company are “cloud-only”? If the CRM in your sales team is down, can you still write emails? A quick check of your critical processes is worth it.

Communication is everything: If your website goes down because of something like this, it is annoying, but mostly force majeure. What matters is how you react. For cases like this we use the monitoring from our Hosting & Care, which notifies us immediately. That way we (or you) can communicate proactively with customers: “Hey, we know about it, it is down to the provider, we are on it.” That builds trust instead of frustration.

Backup & ownership: Tools can fail. But your data should always belong to you. That is the core of our philosophy at Pixel & Process. When the service comes back, your data must still be there.

Conclusion

The internet choked for a moment today. It happens. What matters is that we do not blindly rely on “the cloud”, but understand how our tools work.

Is everything running smoothly again for you? If you are unsure whether your setup is robust enough for the next “hiccup”, just write to us. We are happy to take a look together.

Until then, happy browsing (hopefully without 500 errors)! 🚀

Your team at Pixel & Process