Cloudflare, one of the internet’s most important infrastructure providers, experienced a major service outage on Friday morning. This caused hundreds of websites worldwide to go offline. Major services such as ChatGPT, X (formerly Twitter), and various stock trading platforms were also affected. This incident marked the internet giant’s third major outage in the last three months.

Massive internet outage caused by Cloudflare: Numerous sites inaccessible

The problem began around 12:00 PM Turkish time on December 5th. Users attempting to access sites using the Cloudflare network encountered “500 Internal Server Error” error messages worldwide. The company announced that a fix had been implemented following its rapid response. The issue appears to have been resolved and systems are operating normally. However, even this brief outage was enough to cause the company’s stock to drop 4.5% in pre-market trading.

The outage’s impact was widespread. Major trading platforms such as Zerodha, Groww, and Upstox in India, as well as stock exchange platforms in Turkey, became inaccessible during market hours. This prevented investors from trading and led to an increase in complaints. Zerodha advised its users to use alternative methods to manage transactions while investigating the source of the problem.

The gaming and business world was also affected by this technical disruption. Popular gaming platforms such as Fortnite, Roblox, PlayStation Network, and Rocket League experienced connection issues. Professional tools like Zoom, LinkedIn, and Canva also suffered from the outage. Most strikingly, even the Downdetector site, used to monitor website outages, went offline during this period. Cloudflare confirmed that the issue stemmed from the Dashboard and related APIs.

This incident brought to the forefront the increasingly frequent problems with Cloudflare’s infrastructure. The company had previously experienced a four-hour outage on November 18th due to a faulty Bot Management configuration file. In that incident, a change to database permissions caused the file size to grow excessively and the traffic management system to crash.

Cloudflare powers approximately 20% of global web traffic and serves 35% of Fortune 500 companies. Therefore, even the slightest disruption to the company’s infrastructure can have significant global repercussions. While services are currently operating smoothly, the company continues to monitor the results.

Which platforms did you experience issues accessing during this outage, and how did this impact your work or entertainment?