Cloudflare Scheduled Maintenance Sparks False Outage Claims Amid Internet Warnings

On November 18, 2025, as users across the Midwest braced for potential slowdowns, a wave of panic swept online — not because of a real outage, but because of a misleading headline. Cloudflare, the global network and security provider powering nearly 20% of the world’s websites, had no active incidents — yet Tom's Guide ran a story titled "Cloudflare was down, live updates: Huge chunk of internet taken down by outage." The problem? It wasn’t true. Not even close. The article, published with a misspelled URL ("cloudfare" instead of "Cloudflare"), claimed a massive disruption had already happened. But at 7:58 PM UTC that same day, Cloudflare’s official status page read: "No incidents reported." Eight times in a row. The truth? A scheduled, routine maintenance window was coming — not a crash.

What Really Happened in Chicago?

Cloudflare plans to perform a seven-hour maintenance window at its ORD (Chicago) datacenter, starting at 05:00 UTC on Wednesday, November 19, 2025, and ending at 12:00 UTC. That’s 12 a.m. to 7 a.m. Central Time. The company’s notice is clear: "Traffic might be re-routed from this..." — not shut down, not failed, not collapsed. Just redirected. It’s like rerouting highway traffic during roadwork. You might hit a little more congestion, but the road doesn’t vanish.

Cloudflare’s network spans over 300 cities worldwide. The Chicago facility, while important, is one node among many. During the maintenance, traffic destined for servers in the Midwest will be shifted to nearby hubs in Indianapolis, St. Louis, or even Toronto. Most users won’t notice. A slight lag, maybe 50–100 milliseconds — imperceptible to most. But for high-frequency trading firms or real-time gaming servers in Illinois, it could mean a flicker. No downtime. No data loss. No widespread collapse.

The False Outage That Went Viral

So how did Tom's Guide, a reputable tech site, publish a headline suggesting the internet was down? The article, posted on November 18, uses past tense: "was down." But Cloudflare’s API, which updates every 15 seconds, showed zero anomalies. No spikes in errors. No customer alerts. No reports from The New York Times, Reuters, or BBC News. Even X (formerly Twitter) and OpenAI’s ChatGPT — both of which use Cloudflare — showed normal response times.

It’s not the first time misinformation spreads during infrastructure changes. In June 2022, Cloudflare suffered a real global outage that took down 1.4 million websites for 30 minutes. That one made headlines. This? Nothing. But the echo chamber of tech blogs, Reddit threads, and Twitter bots latched onto Tom’s Guide’s phrasing — "huge chunk of internet taken down" — and ran with it. The language is sensational. It’s clickbait. And it’s dangerously misleading.

Why This Matters Beyond One Article

Cloudflare doesn’t just speed up websites. It protects them from cyberattacks, filters malicious traffic, and ensures content loads fast — even during spikes. When a company like Cloudflare schedules maintenance, it’s because they’re upgrading hardware, patching firmware, or optimizing routing algorithms. These aren’t emergencies. They’re preventative. The alternative? Waiting for a failure, then scrambling to fix it while the world watches.

But when news outlets blur the line between planned work and unplanned failure, they erode public trust. People start thinking every update is a crisis. They panic-buy domain transfers. They cancel CDN subscriptions. They assume the internet is fragile — when in reality, it’s built to handle this kind of thing. The real risk isn’t the maintenance. It’s the narrative.

What Comes Next?

By 12:00 UTC on November 19, 2025, Cloudflare expects full restoration of normal traffic patterns through the Chicago node. The company has not released any post-maintenance impact metrics — no percentage of degraded performance, no user complaints logged — because there shouldn’t be any. Still, engineers will monitor the API closely. If latency spikes persist beyond the window, they’ll investigate. But based on past patterns, this will be a non-event.

Meanwhile, Tom’s Guide has not updated or corrected its article. The URL still reads "cloudfare." The headline still says "was down." And the article still links to a non-existent outage. That’s the quiet danger: misinformation doesn’t need to be loud to stick. It just needs to be published.

History Repeats — But This Time, It’s Different

Cloudflare’s 2022 outage was a wake-up call. Companies realized how deeply they relied on a single provider. Since then, many have adopted multi-CDN strategies. Others built fallback DNS. But most small businesses? They still trust Cloudflare to hold it all together. That’s why accuracy matters. A single misleading headline can trigger a chain reaction of bad decisions — panic migrations, unnecessary costs, even security misconfigurations.

And here’s the twist: Cloudflare’s own status page is a marvel of transparency. It’s real-time. It’s public. It’s verifiable. Yet, the most widely shared story about it is the one that ignores the facts.