A significant technical failure at internet infrastructure giant Cloudflare triggered a widespread outage on Friday morning, taking a host of major websites offline.
Dashboard and API Issues Investigated
The problems began in the early hours of Friday 5 December 2025. Cloudflare acknowledged the disruption shortly after 9am GMT, stating it was actively "investigating issues with Cloudflare Dashboard and related APIs (application programming interfaces)". The company, which provides critical network and security services to countless online businesses, later announced it had rolled out a potential fix and was monitoring the results.
Websites and Services Affected
The outage had an immediate and ironic impact. Among the first sites to be affected was DownDetector, the very platform used by millions to report and monitor online service problems. This created a blind spot for users trying to understand the scale of the disruption.
Further afield, Indian stock brokerage firm Groww publicly stated it was facing technical issues specifically "due to a global outage at Cloudflare". The company confirmed its services were later restored.
A Recurring Problem for Global Internet
This incident marks the second major disruption linked to Cloudflare in a matter of weeks. Only three weeks prior, similar problems at the company impacted a different set of high-profile platforms, including social media site X, AI tool ChatGPT, music service Spotify, and popular multiplayer games like League of Legends.
The repeated incidents underscore the immense, centralised reliance of the modern internet on a handful of key infrastructure providers. When these services falter, the ripple effects are felt globally across diverse sectors, from finance and social media to entertainment and gaming.
