In brief:
₿- Cloudflare outage disrupted major crypto platforms, Web2 sites, and DeFi interfaces, highlighting the persistent centralization risks in user-facing infrastructure despite the decentralization of blockchains.
₿- Bitcoin’s network remained fully operational during the outage, processing blocks, validating transactions, and confirming consensus without interruption, demonstrating its resilience and lack of a single point of failure.
While millions of users stared at “500 Internal Server Error” pages on November 18, 2025- one triggered by a bug in Cloudflare’s Bot Management feature, crashing key software systems- one asset kept running without a single hiccup: Bitcoin.
The Bitcoin network processed blocks every ~10 minutes, miners kept hashing, and transactions confirmed normally. No nodes went down. No liquidity vanished. The BTC price dipped below $90,000 that day, but the drop was driven by macro risk-off flows, not by any on-chain failure. This event once again proved Satoshi’s design works exactly as intended: no single point of failure.
What actually broke during the Cloudflare outage?
At approximately 11:20 UTC on Tuesday, Cloudflare suffered a global internal service degradation that cascaded across its network. By 11:48 UTC the company publicly acknowledged the issue and began rolling out fixes, though elevated error rates persisted for hours.
Major casualties in crypto included:
- Coinbase, Kraken, BitMEX, and Gemini (partial front-end downtime)
- Blockchain explorers: Etherscan, Arbiscan, Basescan
- DeFi protocols: Aave, Uniswap interface issues
- Analytics platforms: DeFiLlama, Dune, Nansen
Beyond crypto, X (Twitter), Discord, Shopify stores, and countless Web2 sites displayed Cloudflare’s infamous error pages.
Third time since 2019: Crypto’s centralized infrastructure problem exposed again
This marks the third major Cloudflare incident to crypto user interfaces since 2019 (previous ones hit in June 2022 and July 2019). Recent AWS outages in October 2025 and the 2024 CrowdStrike catastrophe delivered the same lesson: while blockchains themselves are decentralized and resilient, most user-facing apps still run on centralized cloud and CDN providers.
David Schwed, COO of SovereignAI, summed it up bluntly: “Relying on one vendor and praying they fix it fast is negligence in 2025. True resilience means building as if outages are guaranteed.”
When centralized Web3 died and Bitcoin just kept running
Bitcoin and other genuine blockchain networks don’t need Cloudflare, AWS, Google Cloud, or any single corporation’s permission to exist. On November 18, 2025, that difference was on full display.
While Cloudflare’s Bot Management bug caused a single configuration file to explode in size and take down half the internet, roughly 17,000 Bitcoin full nodes worldwide kept syncing blocks, validating transactions, and enforcing consensus exactly as they have every day since 2009. No emergency calls, no status pages, no “we’re investigating.” Just the longest-running, most battle-tested computer network in history doing what it was built to do.
Your “decentralized” app is only as decentralized as the most centralized piece in the stack. One bug, one misconfigured firewall rule, one rogue config file, and your billion-dollar TVL protocol becomes a white screen with a sad rocket emoji. November 18, 2025 wasn’t a Cloudflare outage. It was a real-time stress test of decentralization claims, and only one asset passed with a perfect score.
Stay informed,
Rodcas Consulting Group