A massive Cloudflare outage on November 18 caused widespread disruption across the internet, and several online poker rooms and poker media sites were caught in the fallout.
WPT Global and a handful of sweepstakes online poker sites were among the services affected, with the outage knocking countless websites, apps, and online services offline for several hours.
WPT Global was among the first poker operators to acknowledge problems, posting on X that “ongoing network issues” had forced the room to cancel and refund all running MTTs in accordance with its policy. While the operator didn’t name Cloudflare as the cause, the timing was nearly identical to the global outage, making it a likely contributor.
Its sister site, ClubWPT Gold, the sweepstakes platform of WPT, serving the US and Canada, also faced login issues during the same window. Both platforms came back online within a couple of hours once the broader internet began stabilizing.
Players also reported difficulties accessing other sweepstakes sites like Clubs Poker and Stake US. But outside of these reports, most major international real-money poker rooms, including PokerStars, GGPoker, 888poker, PartyPoker, and Unibet, remained largely unaffected.
Poker media wasn’t spared either: popular outlets such as PokerNews, Poker Org, PokerListings, and both our sites, including Pokerfuse and Poker Industry PRO, were unreachable for parts of the afternoon.
What Happened at Cloudflare?
Cloudflare provides core infrastructure that powers a huge portion of the modern internet, including content delivery, security, and traffic routing. When the company experiences issues, the impact reverberates globally and on Tuesday, it did.
Around 11:20 UTC on November 18, Cloudflare began returning large numbers of HTTP 500 errors across its network. High-traffic services such as ChatGPT, X (formerly Twitter), many games, and even the outage-tracking site DownDetector all dropped offline at the same time.
Cloudflare later clarified that this wasn’t a cyberattack. Instead, an internal file used by its Bot Management system grew too large, causing part of its traffic-handling system to crash. That failure prevented the network from routing traffic properly and led to hours of instability across the web.
In a public statement, the company apologized for the disruption, saying the issue was caused by a change to a database system that unintentionally filled a configuration file with too much data. Cloudflare emphasized that no malicious activity was involved but acknowledged the seriousness of the event and its impact on customers.
Limited but Noticeable Impact on Poker
The outage also had an impact on online poker sites, causing login failures, frozen sessions, and tournament interruptions on affected sites. WPT Global experienced the most visible impact, with running tournaments halted and cancelled until the network stabilized. Once the outage subsided, the operator resumed tournaments, though it later proceeded with previously scheduled server maintenance.
ClubWPT Gold had a similar but shorter disruption, with its login issues clearing quickly.
Reports also surfaced about Stake US and Clubs Poker facing downtime, though details were limited. Still, the vast majority of major operators stayed online throughout the event, something that highlights differences in how each poker room structures its hosting, CDN partners, and third-party dependencies.
A separate issue later in the day caused problems for the PokerStars US shared liquidity network, leading to players being unable to receive cards or log in. A PokerStars representative confirmed the problem but did not attribute it to Cloudflare. Given the timing after the global outage had resolved, the issues appear unrelated.
Not the First Internet Outage to Impact Poker
The Cloudflare incident is only the latest in a series of major internet outages that have affected online poker over the past year.
In July 2024, the worldwide CrowdStrike meltdown caused Windows systems to crash across industries, grounding flights and disrupting essential services. Poker wasn’t spared: both BetMGM Poker and PartyPoker, which rely on the same software platform, suffered downtime during the chaos.
More recently, in October 2025, BetRivers Poker was taken offline during a significant AWS outage triggered by an internal DNS failure affecting DynamoDB.
Fortunately, this week’s outage was relatively short and had limited impact on poker rooms. Most sites continued running normally, and those affected were able to recover within a short window. Players whose tournaments were cancelled received refunds according to the operators’ policies.
Still, with the growing scale and complexity of cloud networks, these types of global issues are becoming more common. Poker sites will continue improving redundancy and resiliency, but no operator is immune when a service as central as Cloudflare encounters trouble.
