Major outage triggers 500 errors across Zerodha, Substack, and LinkedIn—the second time in three weeks, millions lost access.
Cloudflare, one of the internet's most critical infrastructure providers, experienced yet another significant outage on Thursday, December 5, leaving thousands of users unable to access popular websites and services, including LinkedIn, Substack, Zerodha, and more.
Users attempting to visit affected websites were greeted with the dreaded "500 Internal Server Error" message—a server-side malfunction indicating the problem lies not with users' devices but with backend systems.
Widespread Disruption
According to Downdetector, which tracks outages across the net, around 4,000 people reported issues with Cloudflare within minutes of the incident beginning. However, the actual number of affected users is likely far higher, as some users reported they couldn't even access Downdetector itself due to the outage.
The disruption occurred amid scheduled maintenance across multiple Cloudflare datacenters. Cloudflare had announced maintenance windows for facilities in Detroit, Chicago, Santiago, and other locations on December 5.
In an update to its status page, Cloudflare confirmed it was investigating issues with the Cloudflare Dashboard and related APIs, noting that "customers using the Dashboard / Cloudflare APIs are impacted as requests might fail and/or errors may be displayed."
Despite the dashboard disruptions, Cloudflare reassured customers that its CDN edge network, which delivers cached files to website visitors, remained functioning, and security features, including DDoS protection and firewall rules, stayed fully active.
A Troubling Pattern
The incident marks Cloudflare's second major outage in just over two weeks. On November 18, the company suffered a significant disruption that took many services offline for hours, affecting not only social media platforms but even everyday services—one Reddit user reported that their local McDonald's self-service ordering system had been knocked out by the outage.
During the November incident, Cloudflare told CBS News: "We saw a spike in unusual traffic to one of Cloudflare's services beginning at 11:20 UTC. That caused some traffic passing through Cloudflare's network to experience errors. We do not yet know the cause of the spike in unusual traffic. We are all hands on deck to make sure all traffic is served without errors."
Cloudflare later published a detailed post-mortem revealing that the November 18 outage was triggered by a bug in the generation logic for a Bot Management feature file, causing many Cloudflare services to be affected.
Growing Concerns About Internet Fragility
The repeated outages have raised broader questions about the concentration of internet infrastructure among a handful of major providers. The November Cloudflare disruption followed closely on the heels of a 15-hour outage at Amazon Web Services and another at Microsoft's Azure—both occurring in the weeks prior.
Mehdi Daoudi, co-founder and CEO of internet reliability company Catchpoint, offered a stark assessment of the situation. "This is the third outage in just over a month, with [Amazon Web Services] and Azure both facing similar issues just weeks ago," Daoudi told CBS News. "In each case, these outages have had cascading effects, disrupting other platforms relying on their services and costing billions of dollars."
Cloudflare announced it has implemented a fix, and websites should begin coming back online. The company's engineering teams continue monitoring systems to ensure stability.
Notably, some services that were affected in the November outage appeared unaffected this time, presumably having reduced their reliance on Cloudflare in the intervening weeks (including ChatGPT).
