Question to the Department for Science, Innovation & Technology:

To ask the Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology, whether (a) Government services and (b) critical national infrastructure faced disruption as a result of the Cloudflare outage on 18 November 2025; and what estimate her Department has made of the cost to the economy of that service outage.

The Department for Science, Innovation and Technology is leading government’s response to the Cloudflare outage which occurred on Tuesday 19 November 2025. We understand that Cloudflare services were restored on Tuesday evening, and DSIT is engaging with Cloudflare to understand the full impact of this incident, and how such events can be mitigated in the future.

DSIT has identified disruption to some online Government services, which were restored within hours of the incident. We are not aware of any disruption to Critical National Infrastructure.

The outage affected a wide range of organisations across all sectors, and it will take some time to fully understand the scale of the economic impact.

The Government recognises the importance of robust protections for the services essential to our society and economy – that is why we introduced the Cyber Security and Resilience Bill on 12 November.