A widespread internet outage disrupted access to major websites and services around the world after Cloudflare – a key provider of internet infrastructure and security – experienced a major system failure today (December 5).
The incident began around 09:00 UTC and exposed the fragility of the digital ecosystem, which is heavily dependent on a small number of centralized service providers. The outage affected much of the web as X, Substack, Canva, LinkedIn, Deliveroo, Spotify, Downdetector and more stopped working.
This latest event follows November 18, when Cloudflare suffered a global outage for several hours.
Broad impact
Cloudflare acknowledged today’s issue on its status page, attributing the problems to Dashboard and API issues. It appears to have been resolved quickly, but Cloudflare has yet to confirm this. The outage may have been related to scheduled maintenance, but that is not yet clear.
The situation is very volatile at the time of writing. Cloudflare is we are currently “investigating reports of a large number of empty pages when using the list API on the Workers KV namespace.”
Cloudflare’s Role in Internet Security
Cloudflare services are at the core of the Internet’s performance and protection systems, particularly through defense against distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks. When its systems fail, websites not only go offline, but can also lose a critical layer of defense.
During the outage, users attempting to access the affected sites frequently encountered HTTP 500 server errors, a hallmark of a back-end system failure. Since Cloudflare supports roughly 20% of all web traffic, even temporary outages can develop across industries.
A disturbing pattern of infrastructure failure
Today’s incident follows a series of recent technology infrastructure outages.
Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and CrowdStrike suffered major disruptions, with a faulty software update in July 2024 blocking flights and disrupting hospital operations.
These recurring disruptions reveal the systemic risks of digital consolidation: a handful of tech giants now power much of the global Internet. When one falters, the consequences are immediate and global—spanning finance, health, 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.