Cloudflare Faces Another Major Outage Impacting Global Services

On December 5, 2025, Cloudflare, one of the world's leading internet infrastructure and security service providers, experienced a significant network outage affecting approximately 28% of its HTTP traffic. The outage began at 08:47 UTC and was resolved by 09:12 UTC, lasting roughly 25 minutes. This incident disrupted a wide range of online services, including popular platforms such as Fortnite, Zoom, Canva, Crunchyroll, Perplexity AI, and Valorant, leading to widespread login problems and service interruptions globally.

The outage originated from a deployment intended to mitigate a security issue, which inadvertently propagated errors across Cloudflare's network. This mirrored a similar incident that occurred recently on November 18, 2025. Cloudflare's network employs rapid propagation of updates across its entire infrastructure, a practice that has now come under scrutiny due to these repeated failures.

Cloudflare has publicly acknowledged the incident and issued an apology to its customers and the internet community for the disruption caused. The company disclosed ongoing efforts to enhance the resilience of its network to prevent such widespread impacts in the future. Planned upgrades include health validation, rapid rollback capabilities, improved 'break glass' procedures to maintain critical operations amidst failures, and a transition to 'fail-open' error handling. The latter ensures that if configuration anomalies occur, traffic will default to a safe state rather than being dropped, reducing the risk of service outages.

These resilience projects are in progress, with a detailed breakdown expected to be published soon. In the meantime, Cloudflare has implemented a freeze on network changes to focus on improving mitigation and rollback systems before resuming updates. The company emphasizes the unacceptability of these clustered outages for a network of its scale and is prioritizing the completion of these critical infrastructure improvements.

Users affected by the outage were advised to monitor platforms such as Downdetector or Cloudflare's own status page for real-time updates. The outage notably affected services that rely heavily on Cloudflare's Workers API scripts, highlighting the complex interdependencies within internet infrastructure today.

Cloudflare continues to be a pivotal enabler of internet performance and security worldwide, and these incidents shed light on the challenges of maintaining robust service in an increasingly complex digital landscape.