Cloudflare experienced a major global outage on Friday morning, taking down dozens of high-profile websites including Zoom, LinkedIn, Discord, and Amazon. The disruption affected millions of users worldwide who encountered "500 Internal Service Error" messages instead of their intended pages.
The company confirmed shortly after 9am GMT it was investigating issues with its Dashboard and related APIs. Within minutes, Cloudflare announced: «A fix has been implemented and we are monitoring the results.»
CTO Dane Knecht posted on X that the outage was «not an attack». He explained the root cause was «disabling some logging to help mitigate this week's React CVE». He acknowledged the disruption: «Sites should be back online now, but I understand the frustration this causes.»
Widespread Impact
DownDetector registered more than 4,500 reports from affected UK users just after 9am. The tracking site itself went offline during the incident. Customer issues broke down as 66% server connection problems, 32% website issues, and 2% domain-related.
Affected platforms included Shopify, Canva, Substack, X (formerly Twitter), Deliveroo, and Vinted. Indian stock broker Groww reported facing technical issues «due to a global outage at Cloudflare», though its services have since been restored.
Reddit users expressed frustration. One wrote: «Here we go again, it's down!» Another added: «Business haulted. Second time in a month. It's too much for service as crucial as this. Something needs to be done.»
Second Outage in Weeks
This marks Cloudflare's second major disruption in less than a month. A previous outage on November 18 lasted around three hours, affecting services like ChatGPT, Spotify, and League of Legends.
After that incident, CEO Matthew Prince vowed to prevent recurrence, writing: «It is also the beginning, though not the end, of what we plan to do in order to make sure an outage like this will not happen again.»
Critical Infrastructure Role
Cloudflare operates one of the world's largest networks, providing services to an estimated 20% of all websites worldwide. The company's infrastructure sits between websites and visitors, ensuring sites remain online during high traffic and protecting against attacks.
When Cloudflare experiences problems, the impact cascades across seemingly unconnected websites that rely on its network and security services. The company describes its mission as making websites and apps «faster and more secure».
Note: This article was created with Artificial Intelligence (AI).