The Cloudflare Collapse: A New Digital War Begins and I Saw It Coming

 The Cloudflare Collapse: A New Digital War Begins and I Saw It Coming

Remember today: November 18, 2025. The day the internet shook not from memes or viral videos but from a wave of chaos that swept across our digital landscape.

That’s because a major infrastructure giant, Cloudflare, suffered a global outage. Services like X (formerly Twitter), ChatGPT, Discord, Spotify, League of Legends, and countless other platforms went dark or degraded. And as I warned just weeks ago: this was coming.

 Read my original forecast here: https://outviewit.com/the-digital-battlefield-why-hostile-traffic-is-no-longer-just-a-u-s-problem/

I Warned: The Threat Is Global Now Not Just a U.S. Problem

In my earlier article  “The Digital Battlefield: Why Hostile Traffic Is No Longer Just a U.S. Problem” — I outlined the reality of a world where:

 

• Malicious traffic knows no borders.
• Attack vectors are now geopolitical tools.
• Our global dependence on shared infrastructure is both a strength and a catastrophic vulnerability.Today proved it.

 What Happened?

Around 11:20 UTC, Cloudflare’s systems were hit with what they called an “unusual spike in traffic.”
Let’s call it what it is.
A massive, coordinated hostile traffic event likely a DDoS attack of unprecedented scale overwhelmed even the defenses of one of the most sophisticated internet security platforms ever built.
Cloudflare classified the incident as a “global network degradation.” But for millions of users and businesses, it was a glimpse at a digital blackout.

The Second Act: An Opening for Chaos

Here’s the part that most people aren’t seeing yet:

In a rush to restore services, many administrators are now disabling Cloudflare’s proxy, which means:

• Bypassed firewalls
• No DDoS protection
• No WAF
• Direct exposure to the origin servers
  

That’s the setup the first domino.

And here comes Act 2 of this digital war:

With infrastructures exposed, the attackers now have direct access. The first attack wasn’t the goal — it was the distraction.

As I wrote previously:

“Our dependence on a single protective layer builds invisible systemic risk one failure, and everything behind it falls in minutes.”

 What Happens Next?

This is the moment companies will finally understand:

• Redundancy isn’t optional.
• Zero Trust isn’t a buzzword, it’s survival.

Multi-layered defense is the only path forward.

For businesses, governments, security leaders  this is your moment to react. Or to risk being the next domino

And What If This Is Only the First Act?

Here’s a question few are brave enough to ask:

What if this is only the first act of a far more dangerous second one?

In the rush to bring systems back online, thousands of administrators around the world have already begun applying the quickest — yet riskiest — workaround:

Disabling Cloudflare’s proxy.

And when that happens, something even more serious takes place behind the scenes:

• The Cloudflare WAF is disabled

• Application firewalling disappears

• DDoS protection is lost

• Origin servers become directly exposed

And here’s the critical point:

Many organizations have real, unpatched vulnerabilities — including SQL Injection — that were only being blocked by Cloudflare’s WAF.
With the proxy turned off, these vulnerabilities are now fully exposed to the internet.

In other words:

The first act was the attack that took down the infrastructure.
The second act — far more dangerous — is the wave of exploitation that targets the doors that were just opened.

A perfect setup for large-scale compromise.

The Digital War Has Started. Are You Prepared?

This isn’t a drill. This isn’t hype. This is the future many ignored, now happening in real time.

I warned that hostile traffic was becoming global. I warned that infrastructure dependence could become our vulnerability.

Now, the first cracks are showing. And the second act?… It’s only just beginning.

Stay alert. Stay protected. Stay ready.