Cloudflare, the US-based cloud services provider that powers a significant portion of the world’s internet traffic, suffered a brief but widespread outage on Friday, December 5, disrupting access to numerous popular websites and online platforms. The disruption, which began around 2:26 PM IST, left users unable to access services including Zerodha, Valorant, Instagram, Shopify storefronts, Zoom, Canva, Perplexity, Claude, Fortnite, Facebook, LinkedIn, and others, according to outage tracker DownDetector.
On its status page, Cloudflare confirmed it was investigating issues affecting its dashboard and related APIs. The incident was resolved after 24 minutes, with the company attributing the outage to a change in how its Web Application Firewall parses requests. Cloudflare said the change was deployed to mitigate a recently disclosed industry-wide vulnerability in React Server Components and stressed that the disruption was not the result of an attack.
Although global services have largely returned to normal, Cloudflare noted that some data centres in India remain partially affected, with traffic being rerouted. The company is also investigating elevated error rates affecting customers running Cloudflare Workers, which has resulted in empty pages when using the list API.
