Bitcoin News Today: Cloudflare Outage and Quantum Risks Highlight Internet's Infrastructure Vulnerabilities

Cloudflare Inc. (NET) faced a significant network disruption on November 18, 2025, causing widespread outages for platforms including X (formerly Twitter), Truth Social, and numerous other websites reliant on its infrastructure. The incident, which lasted approximately 30 minutes, triggered error code 500 messages across affected services, leaving users unable to post content or refresh timelines. Cloudflare confirmed the issue on its status page but provided no immediate resolution, stating it was investigating the root cause. The outage added to growing concerns about the concentration of internet infrastructure among a few providers, following a similar disruption at Amazon Web Services in October.

Amid the technical challenges, Cloudflare announced a strategic acquisition aimed at expanding its AI capabilities. The company agreed to acquire Replicate, an AI platform offering access to over 50,000 production-ready models, to integrate with its Workers developer platform. The deal, expected to close within two months, will allow developers to deploy AI models globally with a single line of code, streamlining infrastructure complexities. Matthew Prince, Cloudflare's CEO, emphasized the move's alignment with the company's mission to empower developers, while Replicate's CEO Ben Firshman highlighted the potential to democratize AI development.

The acquisition builds on Cloudflare's recent financial momentum, including a 30.7% year-over-year revenue increase in Q3 2025 and revised price targets from analysts.

Meanwhile, institutional investor Baillie Gifford reduced its stake in Cloudflare by 14.4%, selling 3.676 million shares at $214.59 apiece. The transaction, which reduced the firm's portfolio exposure to Cloudflare to 3.52%, reflects strategic adjustments amid the stock's overvalued status. With a market capitalization of $73.77 billion and a GF Value of $126.99, Cloudflare's shares trade at a premium despite mixed financial metrics, including a negative return on equity of -8.54%.

Beyond immediate operational and financial news, Cloudflare's infrastructure faces long-term risks from quantum computing advancements. A 2025 Human Rights Foundation report revealed that 6.51 million bitcoins-nearly 11% of the total supply-are stored in quantum-vulnerable addresses, including Satoshi Nakamoto's estimated 1.1 million BTC. Legacy pay-to-public-key (P2PK) addresses, like those used by Satoshi, expose public keys on the blockchain, making them susceptible to quantum decryption via Shor's algorithm. Experts estimate that breaking Bitcoin's elliptic curve cryptography would require 2,330 stable logical qubits, a threshold companies like Rigetti and IBM are racing to achieve.

Cloudflare itself has taken steps to mitigate quantum threats, adopting post-quantum cryptography (PQC) standards for its web traffic. The company's proactive approach aligns with broader industry efforts, including the National Institute of Standards and Technology's 2024 PQC guidelines. For Bitcoin, a network-wide soft fork to quantum-resistant algorithms -such as lattice-based ML-DSA- will likely be necessary to secure the blockchain against future attacks.