Major websites experience hours-long downtime due to Cloudflare outage

On December 5, Cloudflare, a key provider of Internet infrastructure, faced a technical problem early Friday morning, causing widespread website disruptions for several hours before the issue was resolved.

The company, which handles traffic management and security for roughly 20% of online platforms, reported that around 9:00 a.m. London time, its dashboard and API services began experiencing interruptions, according to The Guardian.

Sites impacted included LinkedIn, Coinbase, and Substack, CNBC reported. Additionally, the outage tracking platform Downdetector recorded spikes in problem reports for Shopify, HSBC, and the UK-based food delivery service Deliveroo shortly after 9:00 a.m.

Cloudflare provides protection against distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks, which overwhelm websites with excessive traffic. The company confirmed that a fix was implemented and monitoring was ongoing. Its status page indicates that all systems have since returned to normal operation.

This follows a similar incident last month when Cloudflare experienced an error that disrupted multiple websites, including X, Google, OpenAI, and United Press International.

Author: Sophia Brooks