Why Half the Internet Went Down — Cloudflare’s December 5 Outage Explained
On December 5, 2025, Cloudflare — the backbone infrastructure behind thousands of websites and apps worldwide — suffered a major outage. For about 25 minutes, a large portion of internet traffic failed to connect, disrupting access to popular services including Zoom, Canva, trading platforms, and many other apps people rely on daily.
Quick Insight:
The outage wasn’t caused by a cyber-attack or hack. According to Cloudflare’s CTO, the root cause was a technical change — disabling certain logging features meant to fix a security vulnerability — which inadvertently broke parts of their network.
1. What Happened — The Root Cause
• As part of a security update addressing a known vulnerability (in React frameworks), Cloudflare disabled some internal logging features.
• That change caused instability — sections of the network started failing, leading to widespread 5xx errors and unreachable sites.
• Roughly 28 % of the web traffic passing through Cloudflare was affected during the outage period.
• Cloudflare quickly deployed a fix; services were restored within about half an hour.
2. What Was Impacted
• Websites and services across the world — from social media, streaming, and design tools to trading platforms — went down. Some of the affected services included consumer-facing apps as well as business tools.
• Users in many countries experienced inability to log in, load pages, or complete essential tasks.
• For many businesses — especially those relying on Cloudflare for security or traffic management — the outage was a major disruption.
3. What Cloudflare Says & What It Means
• Cloudflare’s CTO apologized and said: “We failed our customers and the broader Internet.”
• The outage was not caused by an attack — but by an internal configuration change.
• Cloudflare will publish a full post-mortem and is reviewing its processes to avoid a repeat.
• The incident highlights how fragile — but also crucial — internet infrastructure is when so much depends on only a few major providers.
Final Thoughts
The December 5 outage is a reminder: even in a digital world — where services usually “just work” — one technical error can ripple across the globe and bring the internet to its knees. For users, businesses, and service providers alike, this shows the importance of redundancy, backup plans, and caution when you rely on third-party providers. As traffic and services centralize around a few giants, resilience becomes as important as innovation.
Tip: For website owners or developers — always plan for “what if core services fail.” Implement multiple layers of hosting or fallback, and don’t assume a single provider will never have problems.
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