Cloudflare Glitch Sparks Global Website Outage

In the early hours of Friday, December 5th, a significant outage impacted many of the internet's most popular websites. Cloudflare, a major provider of content delivery network services, confirmed issues around 4 a.m. ET. Fortunately, a fix was deployed within half an hour, and services began to recover shortly thereafter.

Websites including Canva, Crunchyroll, DoorDash, LinkedIn, Ring, and Zoom experienced disruptions. While Cloudflare also noted separate networking issues on its Workers AI platform, the primary outage affecting other services was swiftly resolved. This incident stands in contrast to a much more extensive outage in November, which paralyzed services like ChatGPT and Uber for an extended period.

That earlier November disruption was attributed by Cloudflare's CEO to a database issue where a "feature file" unexpectedly doubled in size. The recent December 5th event, however, was resolved much more quickly, and the company has yet to release specific details about its cause. Planned maintenance at Cloudflare's Chicago and Detroit data centers today might be a contributing factor.