Cloudflare has apologized for an outage on Friday that affected websites including LinkedIn, Zoom, and Downdetector. This was the company’s second outage in less than a month, following a larger incident in mid-November.
The outage lasted about half an hour and was caused by adjusting its firewall to protect customers from a software vulnerability. It did not result from an attack on Cloudflare itself but from an issue with its application programming interfaces.
The issue affected 28% of Cloudflare’s traffic, causing some sites, including Canva and Shopify, to experience problems. Despite the impact, no data was lost during the outage.
Cloudflare has promised to release more information next week on how it aims to prevent similar failures in the future. The company previously acknowledged that its recent outages have raised questions about its reliability and marketing claims.
Experts say that Cloudflare’s market dominance and centralized services may lead to vulnerabilities, making it less reliable than smaller infrastructure providers. However, Cloudflare has a large customer base and is one of the most widely used cloud services globally.
The outage has sparked concerns among companies about their reliance on key internet services like Cloudflare. With its recent outages and other issues, such as an Amazon Web Services outage in October that affected over 2,000 companies, experts are questioning whether these services have become too centralized and vulnerable to failures.
Source: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/dec/05/another-cloudflare-outage-takes-down-websites-linkedin-zoom