A brief but severe Cloudflare outage caused widespread internet disruption on Friday, December 5, 2025. The problem simultaneously took down major online services around the globe, from professional communication platforms to popular video games. The incident, which reportedly lasted for approximately 30 minutes, highlighted the ongoing vulnerability of the modern internet. Many large sites depend heavily on a small group of infrastructure providers.
Affected services included high-traffic platforms like the business networking site LinkedIn, the communication tool Zoom, and the immensely popular video game Fortnite. Other casualties included the design application Canva, various trading platforms, and other competitors like Anthropic’s Claude AI chatbot. Users attempting to access these sites encountered frustrating connection errors or empty pages, a common symptom when core web infrastructure fails.
The outage, which occurred in the morning for many users, was the second major service interruption Cloudflare had suffered in less than two months. The preceding incident in November 2025 similarly disrupted services globally. This recurrence raises serious questions about the robustness of the highly centralized systems that manage a large portion of the world’s internet traffic.
Cloudflare, a crucial web infrastructure company, acts as a Content Delivery Network (CDN) and security provider. It processes an estimated 20 to 25 percent of all global internet traffic. The company helps websites load quickly, remain online, and protect against cyberattacks. When a core system within Cloudflare fails, the issue rapidly cascades, pulling down numerous unrelated websites and applications all at once.
On its official status page, Cloudflare quickly acknowledged the problem. It initially described the issue as “internal service degradation.” Subsequent updates indicated the root cause was not a cyberattack. Instead, the team identified the fault as a configuration change deployed to mitigate a recently discovered industry-wide vulnerability. The change, intended to improve the platform’s security, accidentally caused the network’s web application firewall to improperly handle requests.
The company stated a fix was swiftly implemented, successfully resolving the outage within a half-hour timeframe. The quick resolution brought services back online for most users. However, the event served as a stark reminder of the internet’s reliance on single points of failure. Experts from organizations like the Internet Society have long cautioned that concentrating too much traffic within a few major CDNs creates systemic risks. When these networks experience problems, the impact immediately becomes global.
For millions of users, the brief blackout resulted in temporary losses of productivity, trading ability, and entertainment access. For tech companies, the incident is a wake-up call. It accelerates the need to diversify internet dependencies and build more resilient, geographically decentralized systems to safeguard against future infrastructure failures. The frequency of these high-profile outages suggests that this dependency remains one of the largest systemic risks to global digital commerce and communication.
