Cloudflare Stock (NET) Falls After Global Outage Hits X and ChatGPT

Cloudflare stock (NYSE: NET) slid on Tuesday after a major outage briefly took down parts of the internet — including X, ChatGPT, Spotify and multiple crypto platforms — before services were restored. ^[1]

As of the U.S. market close on November 18, 2025, NET was trading around $196 per share, leaving the company with a market value near $71 billion and extending a sharp pullback from its early‑November record high near $260. ^[2]

Key Takeaways (November 18, 2025)

NET stock down but still a big 2025 winner
Cloudflare shares finished around $196, down roughly 2–3% on the day and about 15–17% over the past week, but still up more than 80% in 2025 and over 110% in the last 12 months. ^[3]
Global outage hit X, ChatGPT, Spotify and crypto sites
An internal issue at Cloudflare triggered “widespread 500 errors” and an “internal service degradation,” briefly knocking services like X (Twitter), ChatGPT, Uber, Spotify, Arbiscan, DefiLlama, Toncoin and others offline or intermittently unavailable. ^[4]
Billions wiped out in market value, at least on paper
In pre‑market trading, NET fell around 3.5–4%, a slide that Finance Monthly estimates erased about $1.8 billionin market value before regular trading even began. ^[5]
Analysts stay bullish despite volatility
TD Cowen reiterated a Buy rating and $265 price target even as the stock fell 4–5% pre‑market; Stifel and Truistrecently raised their targets to $275, while Cantor Fitzgerald bumped its target to $224 after Cloudflare’s latest earnings beat. ^[6]
Strong fundamentals and AI strategy in the background
For Q3 2025, Cloudflare reported $562 million in revenue (+31% YoY), strong non‑GAAP profitability and lifted full‑year revenue guidance to roughly $2.14 billion, while also announcing a deal to acquire AI platform Replicate, which brings more than 50,000 production‑ready AI models onto its Workers AI platform. ^[7]

Cloudflare Stock Today: Price, Performance and Context

Based on closing data from NYSE and independent quote services, Cloudflare ended Tuesday near $196 per share, down from about $202 on Monday. ^[8]

MarketScreener’s historical table shows NET closing at $202.25 on November 17 and $195.84 on November 18, with unusually high trading volume above 5.1 million shares, well above its 20‑day average of ~3.4 million. ^[9] TradingView lists a similar last price of about $195.99 and flags a one‑week decline of roughly 15.25%. ^[10]

Even after this sell‑off, NET remains a big long‑term winner:

+81.9% “current year” performance in 2025
+112–118% over the last 12 months (depending on the data provider) ^[11]
Market cap around $70–71 billion, versus the mid‑$70 billion range when the stock hit its all‑time high of $260 on November 3, 2025. ^[12]

In the pre‑market session, several outlets reported that NET fell between 3.5% and almost 5%, as traders reacted to headlines that Cloudflare’s infrastructure was behind errors seen across major apps. ^[13] Finance Monthly calculated that this early slide translated into an estimated $1.8 billion “paper” loss in market value. ^[14]

The move also happened on a broadly weak day for U.S. equities: the Dow, S&P 500 and Nasdaq each slipped roughly 1% as investors continued to rethink stretched valuations in AI‑linked stocks. ^[15] That macro backdrop likely amplified the pressure on Cloudflare, which is widely viewed as an AI and cloud infrastructure beneficiary.

What Happened: Global Cloudflare Outage Knocks Major Sites Offline

The disruption

Early Tuesday, a Cloudflare issue cascaded across the internet, producing “500 Internal Server Error” messages and timeouts for users of some of the world’s most popular websites and apps.

According to reporting from outlets including The Washington Post, Business Insider, CoinDesk and the Houston Chronicle:

Dozens of apps were affected, notably ChatGPT, X, Uber, Spotify, Canva, Indeed, Axios, League of Legends and multiple crypto front ends such as Arbiscan, DefiLlama and parts of Toncoin’s infrastructure. ^[16]
Cloudflare’s status page described “widespread 500 errors” and failures across its dashboard and API, noting that “multiple customers” were impacted. ^[17]
Downdetector logged tens of thousands of user reports as sites wobbled in and out of service. ^[18]

The timeline

The rough sequence, pieced together from Cloudflare’s public status updates and media reports, looks like this:

Around 6:20 a.m. ET, Cloudflare saw a “spike in unusual traffic” to one of its services, according to a spokesperson quoted by Business Insider. ^[19]
At 6:48 a.m. ET, the company posted that it was experiencing an “internal service degradation”, warning that some services might be intermittently affected. ^[20]
Through the next couple of hours, Cloudflare acknowledged widespread 500 errors and said both its dashboard and API were failing as engineers worked on remediation. ^[21]
By around 9:40–9:45 a.m. ET, Cloudflare said it had implemented a fix and believed the incident was resolved, though it continued to monitor for lingering issues. ^[22]

CoinDesk notes that Cloudflare told customers it was “aware of, and investigating an issue which impacts multiple customers: Widespread 500 errors,” while several crypto exchanges and DeFi platforms reported parallel outages tied to the same incident. ^[23]

Cloudflare and outlets like Finance Monthly have linked the disruption to an internal service problem occurring during scheduled maintenance in at least one data center, with the abnormal traffic spike acting as the trigger. ^[24]However, the company has not yet published a full root‑cause post‑mortem.

Why it matters so much

As the Washington Post points out, Cloudflare now sits behind roughly one out of every five websites, acting as both security shield and content delivery layer for a large chunk of global traffic. ^[25] When that layer hiccups, the impact is disproportionate — not just on user experience, but on perceptions of reliability for a company whose entire value proposition is keeping things fast and online.

How Investors Reacted: From Pre‑Market Jolt to Closing Loss

Several market‑watching outlets tracked the stock’s reaction in real time:

The Tokenist reported that in pre‑market trading, NET fell about 3.9%, dipping to roughly $193.15 after closing at $202.25 the previous day. ^[26]
CoinDesk cited a 3.5% pre‑market decline after noting that crypto‑related sites were among those knocked offline. ^[27]
Investing.com said the shares were down 4–5% pre‑market, and highlighted that the stock was already off nearly 14% over the previous week, even though it has delivered around 119% over the past year. ^[28]
Finance Monthly framed the pre‑market slide as a $1.8 billion hit to Cloudflare’s market cap, given its roughly $65 billion valuation heading into the day. ^[29]

During the regular session, the stock clawed back some of those early losses but still finished roughly 2–3% lower around $196, with one‑week performance in the ‑15% range and heavy trading volume. ^[30]

Importantly, Tuesday’s sell‑off wasn’t happening in isolation. Investopedia’s live market coverage notes that all three major U.S. indices were down around 1–1.5%, with renewed concerns about “AI‑tied stock valuations” pressuring high‑growth tech names broadly. ^[31] That broader risk‑off mood likely amplified the damage for a name like Cloudflare, which had rallied to a fresh all‑time high earlier this month. ^[32]

Fundamentals Still Strong: Q3 Beat and Upgraded Guidance

The outage landed just weeks after Cloudflare delivered what many analysts considered a strong third‑quarter report. According to the company’s official Q3 2025 release: ^[33]

Revenue: $562.0 million, +31% year‑over‑year
GAAP operating loss: $37.5 million (~7% of revenue)
Non‑GAAP operating income: $85.9 million (~15% margin)
Non‑GAAP net income: $102.6 million, or $0.27 per diluted share
Free cash flow: $75.0 million (13% of revenue)
Cash & investments: about $4.0 billion on the balance sheet

Cloudflare also reported robust demand indicators, with remaining performance obligations (RPO) up 43% year‑over‑year and current RPO up 30%, signaling strong contracted future revenue. ^[34]

On guidance, management now expects: ^[35]

Q4 2025 revenue: $588.5–$589.5 million
Full‑year 2025 revenue: $2.142–$2.143 billion
Full‑year non‑GAAP EPS: about $0.91

TradingView’s earnings snapshot confirms that Q3 EPS of $0.27 beat the consensus estimate of $0.23, and that revenue of about $562 million topped expectations around $545 million. ^[36]

Those numbers underpin why, even after this week’s drop, the stock is still up substantially year‑to‑date — but they also help explain why the shares can be volatile when the narrative shifts. With NET trading well above many “fair value” models and analysts’ price targets spanning from about $117 to $318, small changes in sentiment can cause big price swings. ^[37]

Strategic Angle: The Replicate Acquisition and Cloudflare’s AI Ambitions

Just one day before today’s outage, Cloudflare announced it had agreed to acquire Replicate, an AI platform that makes it easier for developers to deploy and run machine‑learning models. ^[38]

Key points from the deal: ^[39]

Replicate brings 50,000+ production‑ready AI models and a large developer community.
Cloudflare plans to integrate Replicate’s catalog into Workers AI, aiming to let developers deploy virtually any model globally with a single line of code on Cloudflare’s network.
The acquisition is expected to close in the next two months, subject to customary conditions.

Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince framed the combination as a way to make the company “the most seamless, all‑in‑one shop for AI development”, pushing Workers from simple serverless functions toward a full‑stack AI application platform. ^[40]

For investors, that means Tuesday’s outage and stock reaction are happening against the backdrop of a bigger, AI‑heavy growth story, which many analysts still see as intact.

What Analysts Are Saying Right Now

The Investing.com note that hit mid‑morning summed up Wall Street’s tone: ^[41]

TD Cowen kept a Buy rating and $265 price target, even as the stock fell 4–5% in pre‑market trading.
The firm acknowledged the outage and week‑long slide but pointed to Cloudflare’s high growth profile and strong recent earnings.
Stifel and Truist Securities previously raised their price targets to $275 after the Q3 beat, while Cantor Fitzgeraldmoved its target to $224, citing a roughly 3% revenue beat and a 1.7% guidance raise.
Investing.com’s data also notes that NET has returned around 119% over the past year, but that the stock is trading well above some fair‑value estimates, contributing to its volatility.

TradingView aggregates analyst forecasts in a similar range, with a max target near $318 and a low around $117, highlighting both upside potential and downside risk depending on how Cloudflare executes — and how sensitive investors remain to outages like today’s. ^[42]

Key Questions for Investors After the Outage

While today’s move is notable, the bigger story for Cloudflare stock will likely depend on how the company answers a few key questions in the coming days and weeks:

Root cause and safeguards
- Investors will want a clear post‑mortem explaining how an “unusual traffic spike” and internal service degradation escalated into a global outage, and what concrete safeguards Cloudflare is putting in place to prevent a repeat. ^[43]
Customer impact and potential churn
- Finance Monthly and others have highlighted the financial impact of service‑level agreement (SLA) credits, and the risk that some frustrated customers might explore alternatives like Akamai. ^[44]
- Any signs of elevated churn, slower large‑customer growth, or higher cost of sales could weigh on the stock more than a one‑day outage headline.
Regulatory and reputational fallout
- Major outages at hyperscale providers — AWS recently had its own incident — are drawing increasing attention from regulators and policymakers concerned about single points of failure. ^[45]
- Given Cloudflare’s role as critical infrastructure for everything from AI chatbots to financial platforms, scrutiny could increase.
Execution on AI and developer platform strategy
- The Replicate acquisition, the continued rollout of Workers AI, and Cloudflare’s ability to convert its network edge into a monetizable AI platform will be central to the stock’s long‑term narrative — and could either overshadow or amplify concerns about reliability. ^[46]

The next major scheduled checkpoint will be Cloudflare’s Q4 2025 earnings report, currently expected on February 5, 2026, where management is likely to provide more detail on today’s outage, customer reaction and any financial impact. ^[47]

FAQ: Cloudflare Stock on November 18, 2025

Why is Cloudflare stock down today?
Because of a global outage that briefly took down or degraded dozens of high‑profile services built on its infrastructure — including X, ChatGPT, Spotify, Uber and several crypto platforms — investors marked down Cloudflare shares. The stock fell about 3–4% at its intraday lows and finished the session roughly 2–3% lower, amid a broader market sell‑off in tech and AI names. ^[48]

Is this just a short‑term headline or a long‑term problem?
Right now, markets are treating it as a headline‑driven setback for an otherwise high‑growth company. The fundamentals — strong Q3 growth, raised guidance, and an aggressive AI developer strategy — remain intact. ^[49]
The long‑term impact will depend on:

Whether Cloudflare convincingly demonstrates more robust safeguards.
How customers respond in upcoming quarters.
Whether outages like this remain rare exceptions or become a recurring theme.

As always, anyone considering the stock should weigh their risk tolerance, time horizon and portfolio diversification. This article is for information only and is not investment advice.

Why Cloudflare Is Down