Update: Its fixed now!
When many users saw the message “Please unblock challenges.cloudflare.com to proceed” on 18 November 2025, it wasn’t their browser, DNS, or VPN causing the problem. It was a global Cloudflare outage, which broke the security challenge system used by thousands of websites.
Cloudflare’s “challenge” service verifies visitors before letting them access a site. During the outage, these verification scripts failed to load, so websites couldn’t complete the security check — leaving users stuck on this message.
What This Error Means
- Cloudflare’s challenge page failed to load.
- Websites relying on Cloudflare security could not verify visitors.
- Users had no control; the error was entirely on Cloudflare’s side.
Can Users Fix It?
No.
When the issue comes from Cloudflare’s backend or edge network, users cannot solve it by clearing cache, changing DNS, or disabling VPNs. The problem resolves only when Cloudflare restores service.
What Users Can Do
- Wait until Cloudflare systems recover.
- Check Cloudflare status if needed.
- Try again later — the error disappears automatically once Cloudflare stabilizes.
On 18 November 2025, that’s exactly what happened: millions of users worldwide faced this message until Cloudflare restored their challenge service.
What Caused the Outage
- Internal Service Degradation
Cloudflare acknowledged that the issue was due to “internal service degradation.” The Washington Post+2CRN+2 - Spike in Unusual Traffic
The company reported a “spike in unusual traffic” at around 11:20 UTC. This traffic surge caused network errors in their infrastructure. Reuters - Network Configuration Change Error
According to Cloudflare and technical commentators, the outage happened while applying a change to prefix advertisement policies on certain data centers. CRN - Impact on Key Data Centers
The affected data centers were part of their newer “mesh” routing architecture (called Multi-Colo PoP), which is designed for flexibility but also introduces risk if misconfigured. Computer Weekly+1 - Not a Security Breach
Cloudflare explicitly stated that this was not a cyberattack or security breach. CRN
