Cloudflare Faces Another Major Outage, Triggering Global Website Errors

Cloudflare is currently facing another significant service disruption, resulting in widespread 5xx errors and connectivity problems for websites and online services worldwide. This outage comes just weeks after major interruptions earlier in November.

Users trying to access sites that rely on Cloudflare as a reverse proxy or content delivery network (CDN) are encountering 5xx errors. The company’s official status page at Cloudflarestatus.com is providing real-time updates on system performance and tracking the ongoing incident.

Cloudflare confirmed it is investigating problems with its Dashboard and associated application programming interfaces (APIs). Customers using the Dashboard or APIs may experience failed requests and error messages, according to the company’s status update.

Cloudflare, a web infrastructure and security provider, supports a wide range of websites by enhancing speed, reliability, and security. It reportedly assists nearly 20 percent of all websites in managing and securing their internet traffic. Major platforms that rely on Cloudflare include Discord, Notion, X, Spotify, GitHub, and Stack Overflow.

This morning, December 5, users reported outages affecting sites such as Zoom, Canva, LinkedIn, Politico, the BBC, as well as e-commerce platforms including Shopify, Etsy, Wayfair, and H&M. Even Down Detector, the website that monitors internet and app outages, is reportedly experiencing disruptions.

The current outage marks Cloudflare’s third major disruption in a few weeks, following two significant incidents in November. Last month, CEO and co-founder Matthew Prince apologised for the previous outages, explaining that the system Cloudflare uses to protect websites from distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks had failed. While DDoS attempts aim to overwhelm servers and disrupt traffic, Prince stressed that the November outage was not caused by an actual cyberattack.

At this stage, it remains unclear whether the current disruption is related to the causes of previous incidents, and Cloudflare continues to investigate the situation.