Cloudflare, an American company that provides web security and a Content Delivery Network (CDN), reportedly experienced a brief outage, resulting in connectivity issues worldwide. This latest outage marks the second time in nearly a month.
Cloudflare, a critical backbone of the internet, went down with multiple platforms showing “500 internal server errors”. This error indicates a problem on the server side, meaning the issue is not with the user’s device or internet connection, but rather with the website’s hosting server.
However, checks indicate that the outage isn’t worldwide, but only affects certain platforms. The network provider’s official website itself was inaccessible for some minutes.
During the blackout, the service-monitoring platform Downdetector was also rendered inaccessible, confirming the severity of the Cloudflare infrastructure degradation.
Previous Disruptions and Affected Platforms
This is the second outage in nearly a month. In November, Cloudflare experienced a disruption that temporarily impacted online services worldwide. Platforms including X (formerly Twitter), ChatGPT, Spotify, Canva, and Perplexity were severely affected by an hour-long outage.
Nigerian news platforms affected include PUNCH Newspapers, Vanguard, The Nation, TheCable, Daily Trust, and The Guardian Nigeria.
In its explanation following the November incident, Cloudflare noted that its dashboard feature and application programming interface were also failing.
Scheduled Maintenance and Ongoing Investigation
While there’s no official statement from the network provider on the latest disruption, checks on the Cloudflare System Status reveal the company is currently embarking on scheduled maintenance.
An update on the portal at 7:00 UTC on December 5, 2025, reads:
“Scheduled maintenance is currently in progress. We will provide updates as necessary. We will be performing scheduled maintenance in the ORD (Chicago) datacenter on 2025-12-05 between 07:00 and 11:00 UTC.”
While the company acknowledged latency and possible internet disruption, the activity was expected to affect only the Chicago region. However, another update shows it is embarking on scheduled maintenance at notable locations/areas such as Detroit and Bogota.
Around 9:53 UTC, Cloudflare stated it is “investigating reports of a large number of empty pages when using the list API on a Workers KV namespace.”
The company also issued a statement saying: “Cloudflare is investigating an increased level of errors for customers running Workers scripts. We are working to analyse and mitigate this problem. More updates to follow shortly.”
Impact and Expert Recommendations
As Cloudflare is a major force driving global internet accessibility, any outage it suffers can immediately take down many other websites that depend on it. Experts have suggested it’s high time website owners begin to search for an alternative.
This crash follows a recent AWS global outage in October that also affected multiple platforms, including Grammarly, Snapchat, and Reddit.