A worldwide internet outage on November 18 became a full-on meme fest when several major online services, such as X, formerly Twitter, OpenAI, Spotify, and many others, went down almost all at once. What began as a regular disruption quickly turned into a trending moment, courtesy of one man whose supposed first day at Cloudflare coincided with the internet meltdown.
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Internet crash finds an unexpected scapegoat
Cloudflare soon emerged as the centre of the disruption as users worldwide struggled to load apps and platforms. US-headquartered Cloudflare, which offers CDN services, cybersecurity, DDoS protection, and DNS support, consequently confirmed that it was receiving reports of "widespread 500 errors."
Its dashboard and API were also severely affected, with the company saying it was working to “understand the full impact and mitigate the problem.”
But while Cloudflare engineers raced to fix the issue, the internet had already found someone to ‘blame’- a system engineer who had just posted, “First day in #Cloudflare as system engineer, wish me luck.”
Netizens turn detective - and comedians
The user on X posted a picture that looked like Cloudflare's reception area. And that one line was all the internet needed. The comment section immediately lit up with jokes:
"Great job on the first day."
“So you just intern-ed the whole internet?”
“Did you unplug something this morning?”
“Bro just shut down the whole internet on the first day.”
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Another user wrote, “Everyone rushing to X to check if X is down.”
The post racked up more than 6 million views, propelled by users desperate for humor amid digital chaos.
Adding another twist, the man later commented, “fired me on my first day idk why. So I started my own startup.”
However, it isn’t confirmed that the authenticity of the claim or indeed whether the man was genuinely associated with Cloudflare. For now, the outage is resolved, but the memes? They're here to stay.
