A widespread internet outage disrupted access to major websites and services worldwide after Cloudflare — a key provider of internet infrastructure and security — experienced a significant system failure today (Dec. 5).
The incident began around 09:00 UTC, exposing the fragility of a digital ecosystem that depends heavily on a small number of centralized service providers. The outage affected much of the web with X, Substack, Canva, LinkedIn, Deliveroo, Spotify, Downdetector, and others going down.
This latest event follows hot on the heels of Nov. 18, when Cloudflare was hit by a global outage for several hours.
Widespread impact
Cloudflare acknowledged today’s problem on its status page, attributing the issues to Dashboard and API service issues. It seems to have been resolved quickly, but Cloudflare has not confirmed it yet. The outage may have been related to scheduled maintenance, but that is unclear for now.
The situation is very fluid at the time of writing. Cloudflare is currently “investigating reports of a large number of empty pages when using the list API on a Workers KV namespace.”
Cloudflare’s role in internet security
Cloudflare’s services sit at the heart of the internet’s performance and protection systems, particularly through defending against distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks. When its systems malfunction, websites not only go offline but may also lose a critical layer of defense.
During the outage, users attempting to access affected sites frequently encountered HTTP 500 server errors, a hallmark of back-end system failures. Given that Cloudflare supports roughly 20% of all web traffic, even a temporary disruption can ripple across industries.
Troubling pattern of infrastructure failures
Today’s incident follows a string of recent technology infrastructure outages.
Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and CrowdStrike have each suffered major disruptions, with the latter’s faulty software update in July 2024 grounding flights and interrupting hospital operations.
These recurring breakdowns expose the systemic risks of digital consolidation: a handful of technology giants now underpin much of the global internet. When one falters, the consequences are immediate and global — spanning finance, healthcare, commerce, and communications.
Last month, Microsoft confirmed that Azure blocked a denial-of-service attack that involved more than 500,000 IP addresses spread across multiple regions.
