New Delhi, Nov. 18 -- Millions left without access as infrastructure giant's "unusual traffic spike" triggers cascading failures across X, ChatGPT, Spotify, and dozens of critical online services

A massive internet disruption brought down some of the world's most-used digital platforms on Tuesday, leaving millions of users stranded without access to critical services. Elon Musk's social media X platform, OpenAI's ChatGPT, Spotify, and dozens of other websites went dark following what Cloudflare described as an unusual spike in traffic to its global network infrastructure.

The outage began at approximately 11:20 UTC on November 18, 2025, when Cloudflare detected a surge in abnormal traffic patterns across its services. Within minutes, us...