November 18, 2025, started like any other day. Our company website was running smoothly, serving customers, generating leads, and representing our brand 24/7. Or so we thought.
At 2:47 PM IST, a GCP alert reported that our website was down. Not just slow—completely unreachable. What followed was six hours of frustration, investigation, and a harsh lesson about the fragility of even the most reliable infrastructure.
The Cloudflare outage nobody saw coming
As I frantically checked our servers, DNS configuration, and SSL certificates, it became clear that something bigger was happening. It was not just our stack misbehaving—websites across the globe were experiencing the same problem. X (formerly Twitter), Facebook, ChatGPT, Spotify, Discord, and many other well-known platforms were also down or severely degraded during this window.
The culprit? Cloudflare.
The same service that millions of websites use for free SSL, DDoS protection, and CDN capabilities suffered a major global outage. A configuration issue in their edge network impacted core traffic routing and effectively disconnected large parts of the internet for hours.
For almost six hours, our website—and countless others—were either unreachable or returning errors. Even though our origin servers were healthy, users never made it that far.
The real cost of downtime
While the incident was technically “outside our control,” the business impact was very much our responsibility.
- Lost leads from visitors who hit error pages instead of landing pages.
- Eroded trust as existing customers questioned our reliability.
- Revenue impact from missed opportunities during those six hours.
- Increased support load while answering internal and external “What’s going on?” questions.
The most frustrating part was the helpless feeling. Our infrastructure was fine, but traffic was stuck before it even reached us. All we could do was watch the outage unfold and wait for Cloudflare’s engineering team to resolve it.
The problem with traditional monitoring
During this incident, one thing bothered me more than anything else: we only knew something was wrong because of a GCP alert that was not even tailored for this kind of failure.
Many teams found out much later—through customer complaints, dropped transactions, or analytics showing a sudden, sharp drop in traffic.
Traditional monitoring often falls short:
- Check intervals of 15–30 minutes that miss critical windows.
- Focus on infrastructure metrics instead of actual user-facing uptime.
- Little or no SSL monitoring, so certificate issues arrive as surprises.
- Single-channel alerts (usually just email) that are easy to miss.
- Tools that are either too complex or too expensive for smaller teams.
In a world where a third-party outage can instantly take down your business, “eventually you’ll notice” is not a strategy.
What you really need is a way to know within minutes—not hours—when your website, API, or cron-based jobs stop behaving as expected.
How MonitorPlatform solves this
That incident was the final push that accelerated building MonitorPlatform—a monitoring platform designed from day one to handle real incidents like the November 18 Cloudflare outage.
Instead of relying on indirect signals, MonitorPlatform focuses on what your users actually experience: whether your URLs, APIs, SSL certificates, and cron-based heartbeats are healthy and reachable.
Instant detection with multiple channels
MonitorPlatform is built to reduce time-to-detection and make sure the right people get alerted instantly:
- 1-minute checks on paid plans and 5-minute checks on the free plan.
- Multi-channel notifications: email, Slack, and Discord (with more integrations on the roadmap).
- Real-time status pages that can be shared with customers and stakeholders.
- SSL certificate monitoring so expirations never surprise you again.
- API monitoring that validates responses, not just status codes.
- Heartbeat monitoring for cron jobs and background workers.
When something breaks, you should not have to wait for a random dashboard visit or a customer complaint. Alerts land where your team already works.
The monitoring you actually need
MonitorPlatform focuses on four key areas that match how modern systems are built.
URL monitoring
- Monitor uptime and response time for your websites.
- Detect outages caused by DNS, CDN, WAF, or origin issues.
- Track SSL validity so certificate problems get caught early.
Even if a provider like Cloudflare breaks, you still get a clear signal: “Users cannot reach this URL.”
API monitoring
- Check endpoints that power your frontend, mobile app, or partners.
- Validate status codes, latency, and expected response behavior.
- Catch partial failures where the API returns 200 but with invalid data.
Business logic often lives in APIs—if they break silently, your UI might still load while everything underneath fails.
SSL certificate tracking
- Monitor SSL expiry for all critical domains.
- Avoid “Your connection is not private” errors that kill conversions.
- Apply this to production, staging, and internal environments.
An expiring certificate can be as damaging as a full outage, and it is one of the easiest issues to prevent with proper monitoring.
Heartbeat monitoring
- Ping your cron jobs and scheduled tasks on completion.
- Detect when jobs silently stop running or get stuck.
- Use it for backups, data syncs, report generation, and more.
A failed cron job might not show up as “downtime” in the classic sense, but it directly impacts reliability and data integrity.
What would have been different on November 18
If MonitorPlatform had been in place on November 18, the story would still include a Cloudflare outage—but the experience for both the team and our users would have been very different.
- Immediate awareness within 1–5 minutes instead of relying on generic cloud alerts.
- Team-wide visibility via Slack and Discord notifications, not just one person’s inbox.
- Transparent communication through an automatically updated public status page.
- Clear incident timeline with historical checks for post-mortem analysis.
- Less panic, more control, even when the root cause is outside our infrastructure.
We still could not have fixed Cloudflare’s internal problem, but we could have responded like a team that takes reliability seriously: fast, coordinated, and transparent.
The hidden risks you are not monitoring
The November 18 outage was a reminder that your system is only as reliable as its weakest dependency.
Some common blind spots:
- CDNs, WAFs, and DNS providers that sit in front of your app.
- Payment gateway APIs used at checkout.
- Email and notification providers that deliver critical messages.
- Internal APIs that multiple services depend on.
- SSL certificates on less-visible environments (staging, admin, internal tools).
- Background workers and cron jobs that power core business processes.
Every unmonitored dependency is an invisible single point of failure. When it breaks, you only find out after users do.
Start monitoring in minutes
Getting proper monitoring in place should not require a week-long project.
With MonitorPlatform, you can:
- Sign up for free at
https://app.monitorplatform.com/auth/signup - Add your first URL, API endpoint, or heartbeat monitor.
- Connect your notification channels: email, Slack, and Discord.
- Enable your public status page.
- Let the platform watch your critical services 24/7.
Free plan highlights:
- 5-minute check intervals.
- Email notifications.
- Public status page.
- SSL certificate monitoring.
- Up to 10 monitors.
When you need faster detection and higher sensitivity, paid plans unlock 1-minute checks and more advanced capabilities.
Lessons from November 18
The Cloudflare outage made one thing very clear: in an interconnected world, even “bulletproof” providers can and will fail.
You cannot control when the next major outage happens, but you can control:
- How quickly you detect it.
- How fast your team responds.
- How transparently you communicate with users.
- How confidently you sleep at night, knowing something is watching your stack.
For us, six hours of downtime turned into a turning point—a catalyst to build the kind of monitoring platform we wished we had that day.
Do not wait for your own November 18.
Start monitoring your websites, APIs, SSL, and cron jobs today with MonitorPlatform and get alerted the moment something breaks.
Sign up for free and have your first monitors running in just a few minutes.