Cloudflare Outage: Why “Please Unblock challenges.cloudflare.com to Proceed” Took Over the Internet
Millions of users worldwide were locked out of websites on November 18, 2025, after a major Cloudflare outage triggered the error message “please unblock challenges.cloudflare.com to proceed.” The disruption affected platforms like ChatGPT, Canva, X, Perplexity, online banking, and thousands of smaller business sites. Instead of a browser or device issue, the problem came from a failed routing update inside Cloudflare that broke its security verification system. The incident highlighted how dependent the modern internet has become on a few infrastructure providers and how quickly a single failure can ripple across the web.