Coursera’s AI Goes Ahead During Global Cloudflare Crash

LuxembourgPosted on 20 November 2025 by Team

When a major Cloudflare outage rippled across the internet and took down some of the world’s biggest platforms, most of the web went dark for hours. But one company managed to bounce back astonishingly fast — and it did so with the help of artificial intelligence.

During the outage, countless services including X (formerly Twitter), ChatGPT, Spotify, Discord, and Canva experienced disruptions as Cloudflare, one of the world’s largest internet infrastructure providers, struggled with a critical internal failure. The crash was traced back to a dormant software issue — a “latent bug” — buried deep inside a massively scaled threat-management system. A routine configuration update caused the system to collapse, dragging a huge portion of the internet down with it.

While leading global platforms waited for Cloudflare engineers to bring systems back online, an education-technology company — Coursera — managed to restore its services ahead of many global giants. And the secret behind its rapid recovery was a powerful, AI-driven response system.

According to company co-founder Andrew Ng, Coursera’s engineering team used advanced machine learning tools to detect the failure patterns instantly. These tools ran automated diagnostics across their entire infrastructure, identifying weak points, predicting bottlenecks, and recommending real-time rerouting strategies. Essentially, the system acted like a high-speed crisis manager: advising engineers on how to redirect web traffic away from the failing Cloudflare routes and spin up alternate pathways within minutes.

Instead of waiting helplessly for the internet to come back, the team used AI to create a temporary failover system — a lightweight clone of the essential traffic-handling mechanisms they depended on. It wasn’t meant to replace Cloudflare, but it was strong enough to keep Coursera online while much larger companies remained offline.

What makes this story global and important is not just one company’s quick rebound — it’s the broader message: AI is no longer just a tool for innovation or automation. It is becoming a key player in digital emergency response. As infrastructure grows more complex and outages become more disruptive, AI can spot patterns and execute contingency plans faster than any human team alone.

This incident highlights a future where resilience, not just performance, becomes a defining measure of strong digital systems. AI-driven defence, monitoring, and recovery could soon become the standard for organisations wanting to stay online even when the internet’s backbone trembles.

In a world that relies on constant connectivity, this outage proved one thing clearly: when the web goes down, AI is ready to step up.

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