Cloudflare Outage Hits Financial Sector Hard
A significant outage at Cloudflare on November 18 disrupted not just many tech websites but also the financial sector that heavily relies on its services. This downtime, which lasted for three hours, may have resulted in an estimated loss of $1.58 billion in trading volume for foreign exchange and contract for difference (CFD) brokers. During this period, numerous brokers’ websites showed “internal server error” messages, essentially bringing trading to a standstill.
According to a report by Finance Magnates, these losses represent nearly 1% of the usual monthly trading income. Affected companies included Monaxa, Skilling, Xtrade, and FXPro.
Financial Losses Attributed to Over-Reliance on Cloudflare
The report explains that brokers’ heavy dependence on Cloudflare contributed to these significant losses. The service is crucial not only as a content delivery network (CDN) but also for safeguarding against cyber threats, making it indispensable for companies that lack robust in-house security.
Finance Magnates Intelligence noted that the typical outages correspond to about 20% of daily trading volume for these brokers. To calculate the $1.58 billion figure, the report considered trading activity from all CFD brokers, excluding the top 10 that are less reliant on Cloudflare.
In the third quarter of 2025, the average trading volume for this group was estimated at around $174 billion, translating to an average daily volume of about $7.91 billion. Given the timing of the outage, brokers were looking at an average loss of $1.58 billion each. Smaller brokers reportedly faced losses nearing $364 million, while larger entities could see losses exceeding $3 billion.
Cloudflare Attributes Outage to Traffic Spike
Regarding the outage, Cloudflare disclosed that an unusual traffic spike, thought to stem from a bug, was to blame. The company clarified that this incident was not due to any malicious attacks. Jackie Dutton, a Cloudflare spokesperson, explained that the root cause was an automatically generated configuration file intended to manage threat traffic. This file expanded beyond anticipated limits, resulting in a crash of the software systems responsible for handling traffic across many of Cloudflare’s services.
The outage affected several major online platforms, including ChatGPT, Twitter, and Spotify. Other services like Uber, Canva, and League of Legends also experienced connectivity troubles. DownDetector, a site that tracks outages, was briefly impacted as well. In light of these events, Cloudflare’s CTO, Dane Knecht, later expressed his apologies for the disruption.
