Outage monitoring website Downdetector was flooded with reports of users having problems with the internet infrastructure company Cloudflare
04:28 ET, 05 Dec 2025Updated 05:02 ET, 05 Dec 2025
Cloudflare is investigating an outage (Image: Thomas Fuller/SOPA Images/Shutterstock)
Cloudflare is down, taking many websites with it, with thousands of users reporting problems.
Users of X, Substack, Canva and among those affected. This is not the first time that this happened in recent months, with workers across the world impacted.
Downdetector, which tracks outages across the net, notes: “User reports indicate problems at Cloudflare.”
The widely used internet infrastructure company said that it has resolved an issue that led to outages impacting users of many online services.
Visitors to a number of pages were met with a “500 internet server error” warning. The outage came amid a scheduled maintenance.
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Around 4,000 people reported issues with Cloudflare on Downdetector in a matter of minutes but the number of people affected is likely much higher. Some people claimed they couldn’t access Downdetector due to the outage.
It comes after a massive outage of Cloudflare last month affected millions.
What is Cloudflare?
Cloudflare, based in San Francisco, works behind the scenes to make the internet faster and safer, but when problems flare up “it results in massive digital gridlock” for internet users, cybersecurity expert Mike Chapple said.
While most people think there’s a direct line between their digital device and a website, what actually happens is that companies like Cloudflare sits in the middle of those connections, he said.
Cloudflare is a “content delivery network” that takes content from 20% of the world’s websites and mirrors them on thousands of servers worldwide, said Chapple, an information technology professor at the University of Notre Dame’s Mendoza College of Business.
“When you access a website protected by Cloudflare, your computer doesn’t connect directly to that site,” Chapple said. “Instead, it connects to the nearest Cloudflare server, which might be very close to your home.
That protects the website from a flood of traffic, and it provides you with a faster response. It’s a win-win for everyone, until it fails, and 20% of the internet goes down at the same time.”