How a Single Permission Change Nearly Broke the Internet: Cloudflare’s 2025 Outage Explained

How a Single Permission Change Nearly Shut Down the Internet A Forensic Analysis of the Cloudflare November 18 Outage (Technical Deep Dive) Stance Declaration This article includes analytical judgment about Cloudflare’s architecture, operational processes, and systemic risks. These judgments are based solely on the official incident report provided and should be considered professional interpretation—not definitive statements of fact. 1. Introduction: An Internet-Scale Outage That Was Not an Attack On November 18, 2025, Cloudflare—the backbone for a significant portion of the global Internet—experienced its most severe outage since 2019. Websites across the world began returning HTTP 5xx errors, authentication systems failed, …