According to CNET, Cloudflare resolved a major outage that struck at 3:47 a.m. ET on December 5. The content delivery and cybersecurity provider, used by roughly 20% of all websites, saw nearly 28% of its network go down. The outage lasted about 25 minutes and affected high-profile sites including LinkedIn, Zoom, and various banking portals. The company says the problem occurred after it made changes to its systems to increase a buffer for a critical vulnerability. An error emerged after a testing tool was turned off, and reversing those changes ultimately fixed the issue. This incident follows another, unrelated outage back on November 18 that lasted for multiple hours.
The 25-Minute Problem That Feels Like Forever
Okay, 25 minutes. In the grand scheme, that’s not long. But here’s the thing: when you’re a piece of critical infrastructure for a fifth of the web, 25 minutes is an eternity. For a bank customer trying to log in or a team scrambling to start a Zoom call for a crucial meeting, it’s a massive disruption. Cloudflare‘s post-mortem will be crucial, but the initial explanation—a botched update where turning off a safety check caused the failure—is a classic, almost cliché, ops story. It underscores a brutal truth in modern tech: the very tools and processes designed to make systems more secure and stable can, if mishandled, become the single point of failure.
A Pattern of Instability?
This is the second major Cloudflare outage in under a month. That’s concerning. The November 18 incident was unrelated, which is both good and bad. Good because it’s not the same bug recurring. Bad because it suggests potential systemic issues in their change management or deployment processes. When a company’s entire value proposition is reliability and security, two major outages in rapid succession start to chip away at that reputation. It makes you wonder: is this just a run of bad luck, or is there a deeper cultural or technical debt problem coming home to roost? For their enterprise customers, these aren’t minor blips; they’re serious events that trigger SLA reviews and emergency boardroom conversations.
The Brittle Backbone of Everything
And let’s not forget, Cloudflare isn’t alone. The CNET piece mentions the massive AWS outage from October that took down Reddit, Snapchat, and even Amazon itself. We’ve built this incredible, interconnected digital world on top of a shockingly small number of foundational providers. When one of them sneezes, the whole web gets a cold. This concentration of power and risk is the elephant in the server room. Every company, from a giant like LinkedIn down to a small business, is outsourcing a core part of their availability to these third-party platforms. The recent chaos across Cloudflare and AWS is a stark reminder that there’s no such thing as “set it and forget it” in cloud infrastructure. Resilience needs to be designed in, with failovers and plans that assume your primary provider will, at some point, have a really bad day.
What Comes Next?
So what does Cloudflare do now? Fixing the bug is the easy part. Restoring trust is harder. They’ll publish a detailed incident report on their blog, which they’re usually pretty good about. But the tech community will be watching closely. They’ll need to demonstrate not just *what* broke, but *how* their processes failed to prevent it—and what concrete steps they’re taking to ensure it doesn’t happen again. Because at this scale, with their massive market penetration, these aren’t just internal IT issues. They’re global digital infrastructure events. The pressure is on to prove this isn’t the beginning of a trend.
