Cloudflare Outage Disrupts Major Websites Including LinkedIn and Zoom
On 5 December 2025, Cloudflare experienced a fresh outage lasting about 30 minutes, which was resolved shortly after 9am GMT. The disruption affected several prominent sites including LinkedIn, Zoom, Canva, Shopify, Groww, and Downdetector.
Cloudflare stated the outage was not the result of an attack, but followed firewall adjustments intended to protect customers from a widespread software vulnerability. Additionally, a separate issue with its application programming interfaces (APIs) was reported.
This incident followed a much larger outage in mid-November that impacted X, OpenAI, Spotify, and the game League of Legends. That prior outage was caused by a configuration file managing threat traffic growing beyond its expected size.
Following the December event, Downdetector registered more than 4,500 outage reports once services returned online.
Cloudflare claims that about 20% of all websites use its services and that it has nearly 300,000 customers in 125 countries, generating over $500 million in revenue per quarter.
Experts such as Steven Murdoch from University College London and Michał Woźniak highlighted the centralisation risks inherent in internet infrastructure, pointing to a pattern of major global outages since 20 October. They noted that these repeated incidents raise concerns regarding reliability.
Some analysts suggested these outages could increase awareness of Cloudflare's central role in the internet ecosystem, paradoxically enhancing its visibility. However, others warned that such dependence creates systemic vulnerabilities for the internet.
