Published: 1430 Tuesday 18th November
Since 11:20 today major AI services including ClaudeAI, DeepSeek and ChatGPT were unavailable due to a failure in an infrastructure service.
Cloudflare, a provider of edge-caching services, experienced a large scale failure across its network. This service is an hidden piece of the infrastructure used by all of the effected AI systems.
As of 1430 service have not been fully restored.
Many people are beginning to rely on AI tools for their daily work. It is estimated 1 in 5 people in the UK use ChatGPT on daily basis. According to data from IAB in July 2025 there were 15.1 million Britons using the service every month.
The outage is impacting internet sites providing a variety of other services such as X, Medium, Letterboxd, Bet365, and Canva. UK Government websites such as the Office for National Statistics (ONS) and the Scottish Parliament Website are also effected. Retail systems including McDonald’s in-store ordering were unavailable.
Edge-caching services distributed copies of webpages to servers across the internet so that local users receive faster responses for common content. This also reduces the load on service providers’ systems. The goal is to reduce costs, ensure fast response, and – ironically – improve reliability.
Update: 1500 Tuesday 18th November
Availablity of some services has now resumed, although intermittent outages are still occurring.
Some people have noticed there was an impact on workers who seem to rely on the AI services for their tasks:
And some are very surprised how AI is built into their tools without them being aware:
