Another Cloudflare outage briefly takes down sites like LinkedIn and Zoom

A Cloudflare outage hit on Friday, December 5, 2025. It was short but affected a lot of the internet. The problem knocked out dozens of popular services for a bit. Some sites went completely offline. Others just slowed way down. The whole thing lasted about half an hour. It touched some of the biggest platforms out there. This really shows how much the modern web depends on just a few key infrastructure companies.

Things started going wrong just before 09:00 UTC. Cloudflare put up a notice on its status page about service issues. The problems hit the Dashboard and APIs first. Right away, users all over the world saw 500 Internal Server Error messages. They got another 500 failures too. This happened when they tried to load sites that use Cloudflare for protection and routing.

The effects spread fast. Services like Zoom, LinkedIn, Canva, and Shopify took the biggest hits. Trading platforms and design tools struggled as well. Even sites that track outages had trouble for a while. It was ironic that they could not report on the very outage messing with them.

Cloudflare rolled out a fix by around 09:12 UTC. Things started getting back to normal after that. The main disruption lasted between 30 and 40 minutes overall. Some users dealt with extra delays though. Lingering cache problems and routing issues caused that.

Cloudflare made it clear the outage came from an internal configuration change. It had nothing to do with a cyberattack. The company had just learned about a vulnerability in React Server Components. They updated how the firewall handles certain requests to fix it. That update accidentally created an error. The error snowballed into the full outage.

Engineers moved quickly to roll back the bad update. They marked the incident as resolved soon after. Cloudflare said the issue mainly hit the Dashboard and some APIs. The edge network and CDN stayed pretty stable. Those parts handle traffic for millions of sites. They form the real backbone of the system.

This outage counts as Cloudflare's second big one in a month. It brings up fresh worries about how internet infrastructure bunches up with just a few providers. Experts point out that this setup makes a single point of failure. A glitch at one company can ripple out globally. The impact hits right away and proves hard to dodge. Outlets like The Guardian have noted this. They say even brief disruptions show how fragile the web has become. Everything routes through these central platforms more and more.

For regular users, the Friday event served as a wake-up call. Cloudflare does make the internet quicker and safer in many ways. Its huge scale means a single slip can stop big chunks of the online world cold.