By Overview: Big outage today
- On 5 December 2025, Cloudflare experienced a major outage, impacting many users and websites across the UK, Europe and worldwide. Popular platforms — including Zoom, Canva, LinkedIn — reported errors or became unreachable during the outage.
- According to real-time monitoring websites (such as Downdetector), there was a spike in user-reported problems from the UK and several European countries in the last 24 hours.
- This is the second significant disruption involving Cloudflare in a matter of weeks — a previous global outage occurred on 18 November 2025.
Given Cloudflare’s critical role as an internet-infrastructure provider, this outage caused widespread disruption — especially for websites, apps, and services that rely on its content delivery, DNS, and security features.
What is Cloudflare — and why its outage is so disruptive
To understand the magnitude of today’s outage, it helps to remember what Cloudflare does.
| Function / Role | What it means for websites / users | Why outage matters |
|---|---|---|
| CDN (Content Delivery Network) — caches website content across a global network so pages load faster and reliably. | Speeds up web browsing and reduces load on origin servers | If CDN fails, websites may become unreachable or slow to load globally |
| DNS & Distributed DNS / Reverse Proxy — handles domain name resolution and proxies user requests to origin servers. | Allows domain names (like example.com) to map to correct server IPs, hides origin server for security, filters malicious traffic | An outage can break domain resolution or block all traffic to many sites at once |
| Security / DDoS Protection / Bot & Threat Mitigation — filters malicious traffic, blocks harmful bots, and shields sites from attacks. | Protects websites from overload, spam, attacks — ensures stability and reliability | If security systems crash, many sites may get overwhelmed or simply stop working |
| Dashboard & API Services — used by site owners/devs to configure settings (DNS records, caching rules, security, etc.). | Lets site administrators manage Cloudflare features and respond to issues quickly | If dashboard/API fails, site owners can’t manage or fix their settings — increasing downtime risk |
Because Cloudflare supports a large share of the internet — with estimates saying ~20% of all websites use its infrastructure. It lead to a global “partial internet blackout.”
What caused today’s outage (and previous ones)
✅ What the company says
- According to some reports, the outage today was not caused by a cyberattack but by “internal adjustments” — particularly relating to logging features in Cloudflare’s backend, after a related vulnerability in a widely used library (React / CVE).
- The company’s status dashboards and several monitoring sites noted issues with Cloudflare’s Dashboard (the control interface for customers) and certain APIs, which may have prevented legitimate traffic from being properly handled.
⚠️ What past outages reveal
To put today’s events in context:
- On 18 November 2025, Cloudflare suffered a major global disruption due to a bug in its bot-mitigation / traffic-handling software. A configuration file that manages threat traffic “grew beyond an expected size,” causing a crash and widespread “500 Internal Server Error” responses across many platforms (including ChatGPT, X, and more).
- Even though Cloudflare resolved the issue within a few hours, the impact was huge — affecting millions of users worldwide, and highlighting how fragile the internet can be when so much depends on a handful of large infrastructure providers.
So — while Cloudflare’s services are broadly reliable, their reach and scale mean that any misconfiguration or internal bug can ripple out globally.
Who and what is affected: Users, websites, businesses, Europe & UK
Today’s outage is impacting a wide variety of groups:
- End-users / general public: People trying to access popular services (Zoom, LinkedIn, Canva, etc.) may see error pages, slow loading times, or inability to log in.
- Businesses & E-commerce: Many online stores, payment gateways, e-commerce platforms, and business websites rely on Cloudflare for speed and reliability. During outages they risk lost sales, broken checkout flows, and reputational damage.
- Content creators / publishers: Websites delivering news, media, or online content via Cloudflare may become unreachable — impacting traffic, ad-revenue, especially for publishers in Europe/UK.
- Developers & IT teams / Website owners: Those who manage sites through Cloudflare may be unable to access the dashboard or APIs to fix issues, deploy emergency patches or even change DNS settings.
- Global audience — but European countries especially: Monitoring sites show many reports coming from UK, Germany, France, and other European nations.
- Businesses using critical online infrastructure — e.g. banks, fintech, gaming, corporate services: When backbone services like Cloudflare go down, services like login, payments, dashboards, APIs — everything — may break. E.g., some banks and large companies reportedly saw interruptions today.
Timeline of Recent Major Cloudflare Outages (2025)
| Date | Nature of Outage / Cause | Impact & Key Affected Services |
|---|---|---|
| 18 Nov 2025 | Bug in Cloudflare’s Bot Management configuration file that grew too large → traffic-handling crash leading to 500 errors globally. | Big platforms like ChatGPT, X, Spotify, Uber, and many websites are unreachable or unstable |
| 5 Dec 2025 (today) | Internal adjustments to logging / APIs (reportedly after fix for React-related vulnerability) — leading to service disruption affecting dashboard, APIs, CDN/DNS. | Multiple European services are down: Zoom, Canva, LinkedIn, banking services, online games, and media websites. |
This pattern — two major disruptions in less than three weeks — is alarming and raises deeper questions about resilience, failover, and dependency on central providers.
What users and website owners should do (short-term & long-term)
If you or your visitors are experiencing problems due to a Cloudflare outage:
🔧 For Users
- Wait and retry later — most outages of this kind get resolved within a few hours. Cloudflare status monitoring indicates quick restoration after internal fixes.
- Try alternate networks / VPN — sometimes the problem may be regional or tied to particular edge nodes. Switching may allow access if routed differently.
- Clear browser cache and cookies — in case old cached pages or old DNS data cause issues rendering after the outage. (Common tip for access issues.)
For Website Owners / Devs
- Check if outage is global or local — Use sources like the official Cloudflare Status Page, and crowd-sourced monitors like Downdetector or IsDown.app to see if others report issues.
- If possible, temporarily pause Cloudflare / enable “development mode” / bypass CDN — serve traffic directly from your origin server until service is stable. This reduces downtime and restores at least basic functionality.
- Configure backup DNS / fallback CDN — rely on secondary DNS provider or alternative CDN in case Cloudflare fails. Use low TTL (30–60 s) for failover.
- Communicate with your users / customers — via social media, email or alternate status page (not behind Cloudflare), to keep them informed about downtime and expected resolution.
- Monitor origin server health and split metrics between origin and CDN paths — helps distinguish whether the issue is with Cloudflare or your server.
Deeper implications: What repeated Cloudflare outages tell us about internet infrastructure
1. Over-reliance on “big infrastructure providers”
That a single configuration error at Cloudflare can cripple massive swaths of the internet underscores a fundamental fragility: many websites, platforms and services — from small blogs to multinational corporations — outsource critical parts of their infrastructure to a handful of providers.
When one of them fails, the impact cascades.
2. Need for redundancy & decentralization
For mission-critical services (finance, health, e-commerce, SaaS), relying solely on one CDN / DNS / security provider is risky. These recent outages show why backup providers, multi-CDN strategies, or hybrid architectures (origin + cache + fallback) make sense.
3. Transparency & accountability become essential
Users generally don’t know which infrastructure underpins a website; but outages like this cause widespread frustration. Providers like Cloudflare should enhance transparency (status dashboards, root-cause postmortems, communication). Repeated failures may erode trust.
4. Growing importance of outage detection & user reports
Automated monitoring tools (status pages, third-party trackers, crowd-sourced systems) are critical. They provide early detection, alerts, and help differentiate between local network issues vs. global provider problems.
5. Pressure on major providers to improve resilience
Frequent disruptions risk earning reputational damage for companies like Cloudflare. As more businesses depend on these networks, pressure increases for better testing, failover systems, and safeguards to prevent wide-scale outages.
What we know — and what remains unclear (as of now)
✅ Confirmed
- Multiple websites and services across Europe and the UK experienced downtime or accessibility issues today.
- The problem appears to stem from internal adjustments / API changes at Cloudflare, not necessarily from an external cyber-attack.Cloudflare’s status page and third-party monitors show elevated incident reports and “possible issues” in relevant components (CDN, DNS, Dashboard/API).
❓ Unclear / Still evolving
- We don’t yet have a complete root-cause post-mortem from Cloudflare explaining exactly what internal change triggered this outage (as of early reports).
- It’s uncertain how many websites globally were affected — impact may vary depending on configuration (some may fallback, some may go down entirely).
- Long-term effects — for example, whether this will push many site owners to re-evaluate their reliance on Cloudflare and adopt multi-provider strategies — remain to be seen.
What users & businesses should watch now
- Check the official Cloudflare status page (or trusted status-monitoring sites) to see when services are restored.
- For critical websites/applications — consider adding redundancy (backup DNS, alternate CDNs), to avoid single-point-of-failure risk.
- If you run a site: evaluate whether bypassing Cloudflare temporarily (origin-only mode) is feasible during outages.
- Update stakeholders/customers proactively if services impact them; transparency helps maintain trust during downtime.
- Monitor broader industry response — repeated outages could trigger regulatory scrutiny or shift in infrastructure practices (e.g. more decentralization).
Conclusion
The December 5, 2025 outage of Cloudflare — affecting large portions of the UK, Europe, and the global internet — is a stark reminder of how reliant we are on a handful of infrastructure providers. When they falter, entire swathes of websites and services go down with them.
For everyday users, it translated into broken access to things like Zoom calls, online tools, or banking portals. For businesses and site owners, it was a moment of vulnerability — revealing the fragility of highly centralized internet architecture.
If you manage a website or depend heavily on online services, today’s events should prompt a serious reevaluation: build redundancies, plan for failovers, and avoid putting “all your eggs” into a single provider’s basket.
