Major Cloudflare Outage Internet Offline on Friday Morning
A widespread Cloudflare outage early Friday morning caused major disruptions across the internet, leaving millions of users unable to access many popular websites. The issue, which triggered countless “500 Internal Server Error” messages, made a large portion of the web inaccessible for a period of time—marking the second significant Cloudflare failure in just a few weeks.
According to Cloudflare, the outage stemmed from a change made to its firewall system, which unexpectedly interfered with how incoming requests were processed. The company quickly clarified that the incident was not the result of a cyberattack, but rather a technical error introduced during routine system adjustments.
The disruption began around 3:40 a.m. ET on Friday, Dec. 5, according to Downdetector, a website that tracks internet service issues. Reports started to decline roughly an hour later, although users were still reporting scattered problems until around 6:30 a.m. In an ironic twist, Downdetector itself became unreachable during the outage, highlighting just how deeply Cloudflare’s services are integrated across the web.
By just before 5 a.m., Cloudflare confirmed on X (formerly Twitter) that the issue involved a new change in how their firewall parses incoming requests. This glitch impacted the availability of Cloudflare’s network “for several minutes,” the company said. Although the outage occurred shortly before a scheduled maintenance window, Cloudflare reported no direct connection between the two events.
Second Cloudflare Disruption in Recent Weeks
This incident follows another major Cloudflare outage that occurred on November 18, when websites like X, Spotify, and ChatGPT experienced widespread downtime. In that case, the company attributed the issue to a spike in unusual traffic targeting one of its services, which caused portions of the network to return errors.
The back-to-back nature of these outages has raised concerns about the growing dependence on Cloudflare, which plays a crucial role in keeping a massive portion of the internet running smoothly.
What Cloudflare Does—and Why Outages Hit Hard
Cloudflare is a leading internet infrastructure and security company providing a wide range of services, including cybersecurity protection, Domain Name System (DNS) routing, and wide area networking (WAN). DNS, in particular, is a vital backbone service that translates human-readable website names into IP addresses computers use to connect with servers.
Because so many websites rely on Cloudflare for security, speed, and reliable domain routing, any disruption can have a ripple effect across global internet traffic. Cloudflare’s network spans more than 125 countries and includes over 330 data centers, handling an average of more than 81 million webpage requests every second. With such a massive footprint, even a short-lived outage can lead to widespread service interruptions.
Websites Affected by the Cloudflare Outage
Based on reports tracked during the incident, many widely used platforms experienced downtime or connectivity issues, including:
Amazon Web Services
Coinbase
Crunchyroll
Crypto.com
Delta
DoorDash
Fortnite
Grindr
League of Legends
LinkedIn
Metronet
Substack
Zoom
As Cloudflare continues to investigate and refine its systems, many users and businesses are watching closely—hoping that the company can prevent future disruptions and strengthen the stability of the services so many online platforms rely on daily.
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