If you tried to get some work done on Canva, check your stocks on Zerodha, or even see if other sites were down using Downdetector on Friday afternoon, you probably ran into a digital brick wall. It was one of those moments where you start to wonder if your own internet is on the fritz, but the reality was much bigger. A massive, widespread outage at Cloudflare sent a ripple effect across the web, taking a huge chunk of our favorite and most critical services down with it.
Key Highlights
- ✓ A major Cloudflare outage on Friday, December 5, 2025, caused widespread service disruptions.
- ✓ Popular platforms like Zerodha, Groww, Canva, Zoom, and Shopify were all affected.
- ✓ Downdetector registered over 2,100 reports of issues starting around 1:50 p. m.
- ✓ This was the second significant disruption in about a month, following a similar event in November.
- ✓ The company cited issues with its dashboard and related APIs, with one report mentioning planned maintenance. What's particularly interesting is
The Moment the Dominoes Fell
It all started kicking off around 1:50 p. m. on Friday, December 5, 2025. That’s when the alerts on outage-tracking sites began to spike. According to Downdetector, there were more than 2,100 reports flooding in, confirming that this wasn't just an isolated hiccup. People were suddenly unable to access a whole slew of unrelated websites and apps, leading to a collective "what is going on. " moment online.
The data from these reports gives us a clear picture of what people were experiencing. A huge 69% of the issues were straight-up website outages—pages just not loading. Another 23% of users reported problems with server connections, and a smaller 8% were facing hosting-related issues. The common thread weaving through all this chaos was Cloudflare, the internet infrastructure giant that so many companies rely on.
Cloudflare itself confirmed it was investigating problems affecting its dashboard and related Application Programming Interfaces (APIs). Essentially, the tools that help manage and run its services were experiencing interruptions. While the company quickly moved to implement a fix, the damage was already done, sparking a wave of frustration across social media, particularly on X.
The Wide-Reaching Impact: From Trading to Gaming
Here's the thing about a Cloudflare outage: it’s not like one app going down. One key aspect to consider is Because Cloudflare acts as a protective and performance-enhancing layer for millions of websites, its problems become everyone's problems. The list of affected services was incredibly diverse, highlighting just how deeply embedded this technology is in our daily digital lives.
Major trading platforms like Zerodha and Groww were hit, causing understandable panic for users trying to manage their finances. Zerodha acknowledged the issue, stating that its Kite services were unavailable due to the cross-platform downtime. They even advised users to rely on a Kite WhatsApp backup to manage trades—a clear sign of the severity of the situation. Thankfully, both platforms later confirmed that their services were fully restored, with Zerodha announcing, "You can now trade normally. "
But it wasn't just about finance. Creative professionals using Canva were locked out, businesses running on Shopify faced disruptions, and even remote teams trying to connect on Zoom ran into trouble. The gaming community wasn't spared either, with the popular game Valorant also suffering from the downtime. In a moment of supreme irony, even Downdetector—the very site people rush to when they suspect an outage—was knocked offline for a period.
Déjà Vu: We've Been Here Before
Part of the intense frustration bubbling up online stems from the fact that this felt eerily familiar. This wasn't a one-off event. In fact, it was the second major Cloudflare disruption in just about a month. Back in November, a similar issue took down a who's who of the internet, including massive platforms like Spotify, ChatGPT, and even President Donald Trump’s Truth Social platform.
The November list was even longer, impacting X (formerly Twitter), League of Legends, Perplexity, Gemini, Grindr, and Letterboxd. Seeing another major outage so soon after left many users and businesses demanding answers and questioning the reliability of the very infrastructure designed to provide it. People took to social media to share how their work and businesses were directly impacted, urging the company to resolve these recurring issues for good. Another important factor is
Why One Company's Problem Shakes the Entire Internet
So, why does one company have the power to cause such widespread digital chaos. To put it simply, Cloudflare is one of the largest networks powering the modern internet. It doesn't host the websites themselves, but it acts as a crucial middle layer, or a "reverse proxy," sitting between a website's server and the end user.
This position allows it to provide vital services. It helps websites load faster by caching content closer to users around the world, and it protects them from malicious traffic, like Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS attacks). Millions of websites, from individual bloggers to massive corporations and non-profits, rely on this shield and speed boost. The downside of this model, as we saw on Friday, is that it creates a central point of failure. When Cloudflare stumbles, a significant portion of the internet stumbles with it.
Conclusion
The Cloudflare outage of December 5th was more than just a temporary inconvenience; it was a powerful demonstration of the internet's interconnected and often fragile ecosystem. It affected everything from our financial trades and business operations to our creative projects and entertainment. While services were eventually restored, the event left a lasting impression, especially coming so soon after the November disruption.
The bottom line is that a handful of major infrastructure companies hold the keys to a vast portion of our digital world. These events serve as a crucial reminder of that dependency and spark important conversations about the resilience and architecture of the internet we all rely on every single day.
