18 November 2025

...and Critical Minerals could make the next outage permanent

In an era where the internet powers everything from remote work to AI-driven innovation, Cloudflare has long served as one of the invisible guardians of the digital world. With points of presence in more than 330 cities across six continents, its global edge network delivers lightning-fast content, ironclad cybersecurity, and near-instant performance to roughly one in five websites worldwide. Right now, that guardian is recovering from its biggest stumble in years.

As of 17:20 UTC on November 18, 2025, Cloudflare’s major global outage, triggered by an automatically generated configuration file meant to manage threat traffic that instead caused widespread internal degradation, has been fully resolved, with services recovering across its network. The incident began at approximately 11:20 UTC (6:20 AM ET), impacting major platforms like X, ChatGPT, Spotify, Canva, and thousands of other sites with HTTP 500 errors and connectivity issues; a fix was deployed around 14:30 UTC, restoring normal operations globally. Cloudflare confirms the issue is fixed, with no residual errors reported, and teams are monitoring for stability. No evidence suggests a cyberattack or malicious activity was behind it, and no data breach has been detected.

At its peak, millions of sites and services were knocked offline or severely impaired, including Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Amazon, ChatGPT (OpenAI), Claude (Anthropic), Spotify, X (Twitter), Discord, Canva, Crunchyroll, League of Legends, DoorDash, Shopify stores, Home Depot, Bet365, Vinted, NJ Transit, Truth Social, Indeed, Letterboxd, Perplexity, Gemini, and even DownDetector itself, many throwing 500 errors, "you have been blocked" pages, or becoming completely unreachable.

Recovery began as early as 13:35 UTC for services like Cloudflare Access and WARP, with most application services stabilising by mid-afternoon UTC. Some lingering issues may still affect the Dashboard, API, and support portal.

Real-time status: Mostly operational, with minor residual issues in select regions. Live status page: https://www.cloudflarestatus.com/

This is not a minor hiccup. When a single company that routes roughly 20% of global web traffic fails, billions of people and virtually every major online service are affected simultaneously. Today’s blackout is the clearest evidence yet of how perilously centralised internet infrastructure has become, and how utterly dependent that infrastructure is on a small group of critical minerals whose supply is finite, geographically concentrated, and increasingly at risk.

Every rack in Cloudflare’s 330+ cities, every chip, cable, and cooling system, relies on lithium, cobalt, rare earths, gallium, copper, and a dozen other materials controlled by just a few nations. Today’s hours-long crisis is merely the symptom; the looming mineral supply crunch is the systemic threat that could turn future incidents into prolonged, economy-wide disruptions.

The world’s data centre footprint is heavily concentrated in a small number of mature digital economies. The United States dominates by a wide margin, with the largest cluster of facilities in Northern Virginia’s "Data Center Alley", supported by other major hubs such as Dallas, Phoenix, Chicago and Silicon Valley. In Europe, infrastructure is anchored in Germany, the United Kingdom, France and the Netherlands, with Frankfurt, London and Amsterdam acting as core interconnection nodes around DE-CIX, LINX and AMS-IX respectively. Across Asia-Pacific, data centre capacity is concentrated in China, Japan, Australia, Singapore and India, where large cloud and hyperscale campuses serve rapidly growing digital and AI workloads. Secondary but fast-growing markets are emerging in regions such as Latin America, the Middle East and Africa, yet the bulk of global compute and storage remains clustered in North America, Western Europe and a handful of Asia-Pacific gateway cities.

Jamie Underwood

Principal Consultant

Ismet Soyocak

Critical Minerals Lead

Dr Jenny Watts

Critical Minerals Technologies Expert

Engineering the edge of the Internet

Founded in 2009, Cloudflare has evolved from a simple content delivery network (CDN) into a comprehensive cloud platform, protecting and accelerating one in five of the world's websites. Its secret sauce? A distributed edge network that processes traffic at the closest point to the user, minimising latency without backhauling data to distant servers. This setup relies on colocated facilities, partner data centres where Cloudflare deploys its custom hardware, rather than owning massive centralised buildings. From Chicago to Cape Town, these nodes handle 192 terabits per second of traffic, caching content and filtering threats in real time.

Yet, scaling this network isn’t just about software smarts, it’s about physical infrastructure. Each data centre racks up thousands of servers equipped with specialised circuitry, cooling systems, and power supplies. As AI workloads continue to grow, projected to triple data centre energy use by 2028, the need for efficient, high-performance hardware intensifies. Enter critical minerals, the building blocks that make this possible.

Critical Minerals: The hidden fuel of tech infrastructure

Critical minerals are essential to economic and national security due to their irreplaceable roles in manufacturing and vulnerability to supply disruptions. The U.S. Geological Survey's final 2025 List, published on 6 November, identifies 60 such minerals, including lithium, cobalt, rare earth elements (like neodymium and dysprosium), copper, aluminium, gallium, and new additions such as uranium, metallurgical coal, and potash. These materials underpin everything from clean energy transitions to AI-driven technologies, yet their supply chains face escalating risks from geopolitical tensions, export controls, and concentrated processing, particularly China's dominance in refining over 70% of key minerals.

In data centres like those powering Cloudflare's edge network, critical minerals are ubiquitous, enabling the massive computational demands of AI workloads, real-time threat detection, and petabyte-scale data handling. As AI data centres surge, these minerals’ vulnerabilities could amplify outages or cost hikes, as seen in recent supply shocks.

• Serverboards & circuitry — At the heart of every Cloudflare server lies a complex printed circuit board laced with copper traces, gold-plated contacts, silver thermal interfaces, and tantalum capacitors. Copper carries signals at blistering speed while resisting heat-induced failure, gold prevents oxidation on critical connectors, silver offers the lowest thermal resistance for heat spreaders, and tantalum delivers stable capacitance in the tiniest packages. Without this quartet, high-frequency data processing at the edge simply collapses. Recent Chinese export curbs on related processing tech heighten risks, potentially delaying server builds amid AI's copper demand boom.

• Processors and semiconductors — The AI boom and real-time threat detection that Cloudflare performs billions of times per second depend on cutting-edge chips. Silicon forms the base substrate, but gallium arsenide and germanium enable the high-electron-mobility transistors needed for ultra-fast switching and low-noise amplification in 800 Gbps+ optical modules. Indium phosphide further boosts optical transceivers for data centre interconnects. A single missing wafer of high-purity gallium or germanium can halt an entire production line, as evidenced by China's 2024–2025 restrictions on these exports, which control 80%+ of global supply.

• Storage drives — Even with aggressive caching, Cloudflare still writes logs, analytics, and customer data at a petabyte scale. Hard-disk drives rely on ruthenium and platinum coatings on platters, neodymium-iron-boron magnets, the strongest permanent magnets known, to position read/write heads with sub-nanometre precision. Lose access to refined neodymium or platinum, and long-term storage capacity grinds to a halt.

• Power supplies and batteries — Edge nodes must survive power blips that last seconds to minutes. Large-scale UPS systems and emergency battery arrays therefore incorporate lithium for energy density, cobalt for thermal stability, and nickel for higher voltage cells, often in NMC chemistries. A single rack can contain dozens of kilograms of these metals, quietly ensuring the network stays up when the grid flickers. Yet, a sustained supply shock could hike battery prices, amid China's new 2025 export limits on lithium-ion chains and refining dominance.

• Cooling & structural — Hundreds of kilowatts course through each facility, turning servers into space heaters. Aluminium heatsinks and cold plates pull that energy away, while indium-based thermal interface materials fill the microscopic gaps between the chip and the cooler. The lightweight yet rigid aluminium frames also allow rapid deployment of new racks in leased colocation space, with tellurium aiding advanced thermoelectric cooling. These often-overlooked metals are what keep processors from melting under AI and DDoS mitigation workloads, though China's curbs on indium and tellurium processing could spike costs for immersion-cooled hyperscalers.

These minerals ensure servers run cooler, faster, and more reliably. For instance, neodymium magnets in hard drives enable the dense data storage needed for Cloudflare’s caching, while gallium in semiconductors boosts efficiency in edge computing. Without them, the network’s vaunted speed, delivering content in milliseconds, would grind to a halt.

Securing a sustainable digital future

For Cloudflare, these minerals represent a hidden vulnerability. A single export curb on gallium from China, a strike in a Congolese cobalt mine, or tightened controls on rare earths can delay server rollouts, drive up costs, and threaten the relentless expansion of its edge network. Past precedents, such as the 2010 rare-earth embargo that slashed global magnet supplies, show how quickly geopolitical tensions can ripple through the internet itself.

Yet the outlook is far from bleak. Governments and industry are moving decisively toward resilience, with new funding streams for domestic mining and processing, G7 partnerships to build alternative supply chains, and breakthroughs in cleaner extraction methods that drastically cut water and energy use. Recycling programmes are maturing fast, with recovered metals from old servers already feeding back into production lines. Cloudflare itself can accelerate this shift, by partnering with urban mining firms, designing hardware that uses fewer scarce materials, and prioritising ethical sources from stable allies such as Canada and Australia.

Ultimately, Cloudflare’s network is not just code and fibre, it is a mineral-powered marvel that keeps the modern world online. As AI and edge computing push demand ever higher, ignoring these supply risks invites outages, inflation, and stalled innovation. By championing diversified, responsible, and circular supply chains, Cloudflare and the wider industry can ensure the internet remains fast, reliable, and sustainable for decades to come. In the race toward net-zero, the true edge will belong to those who secure both speed and stewardship of the critical minerals beneath it all.