If you’ve tried loading LinkedIn or firing up Canva today, you probably ran into frustrating error messages. You’re not alone—a fresh Cloudflare outage on December 5, 2025, knocked several popular websites and apps offline for users around the world.
Cloudflare, the San Francisco-based company that powers a huge chunk of the internet’s backbone, started showing signs of trouble early on December 5. People quickly noticed issues with 500 Internal Server Error pages popping up, or apps claiming there’s “no internet connection” even when everything else worked fine.
What Sites Were Affected by the Cloudflare Outage?
This disruption rippled across dozens of services that rely on Cloudflare for speed, security, and reliability. Some of the biggest names hit included:
- LinkedIn – Mobile users especially saw persistent connection errors.
- Canva – Designers and creators couldn’t access their projects.
- Zoom – Video calls and meetings faced interruptions.
- Notion, Shopify, Coinbase, and even SpaceX’s site in some cases.
- Trading platforms like Zerodha and Groww in India.
- Ironically, Downdetector itself went down, making it harder to confirm the scale.
It’s a stark reminder of how interconnected the web is. Cloudflare handles traffic for about 20% of all websites globally, acting as a shield against DDoS attacks, speeding up load times, and managing DNS. When it stumbles, the effects are felt far and wide.
Why Do These Cloudflare Disruptions Keep Happening?
This isn’t the first time—it’s actually the second major Cloudflare outage in just a few weeks. Back on November 18, a buggy configuration file meant to block threats grew too large and crashed key systems, taking down sites like ChatGPT, Spotify, Grindr, and X (formerly Twitter) for hours.
Cloudflare apologized profusely then, saying they were “deeply sorry for letting down our customers and the internet in general.” For today’s incident, the company acknowledged “internal service degradation” and issues with their dashboard and APIs, but details on the exact cause remain thin so far. They’re investigating, and services started stabilizing as they rolled out fixes.
These events highlight a bigger issue: as more businesses lean on a handful of infrastructure giants like Cloudflare, AWS, or Azure, a single glitch can cascade into widespread chaos. It’s not usually cyberattacks—just complex systems under enormous strain.
What Should You Do During Outages Like This?
Outages are annoying, but they’re often short-lived. Here’s some quick advice:
- Refresh the page or restart the app after a few minutes.
- Check status pages like cloudflarestatus.com for real-time updates.
- Use alternatives if possible—switch to a different tool temporarily.
- For businesses, consider multi-provider setups to avoid putting all eggs in one basket.
Thankfully, most reports suggest things are getting back to normal now, though some lingering glitches might pop up as traffic ramps up again.
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