Cloudflare suffers second major outage in a month, knocking global platforms offline

Cloudflare experienced another widespread outage on Friday morning, disrupting access to dozens of major websites and raising renewed concerns about the resilience of the internet infrastructure that underpins much of the modern web.

The incident, which began shortly before 10am, affected platforms including Zoom, Canva, Discord, LinkedIn, Deliveroo, Substack, Shopify, Coinbase and Vinted, according to user reports and outage tracker Downdetector.

The monitoring service registered more than 3,000 reports from users at the peak of the disruption, with 68 per cent citing server connection issues.

Some online services used to track outages were themselves impacted. Downdetector briefly went offline before restoring service, while a site dedicated to monitoring Downdetector also became inaccessible.

On Reddit, frustrated users described the outage as the latest in a string of service interruptions. One wrote: “Business halted. Second time in a month. It’s too much for a service as crucial as this. Something needs to be done.” A third commenter noted: “Imagine how much money businesses are losing.”

Cloudflare issued a service update shortly after the problems began, stating it was “investigating the issue”. Minutes later, the company said a fix had been implemented and that teams were “monitoring the results”.

The outage comes amid scheduled maintenance at Cloudflare’s Detroit data centre, announced earlier this morning. The company had said that traffic might be rerouted from the location, potentially causing higher latency for some users. Many speculated online that the maintenance works were linked to the outage, though Cloudflare has not yet confirmed the cause.

Friday’s disruption marks Cloudflare’s second major incident in nearly a month. On 18 November, a separate outage temporarily knocked hundreds of websites and apps offline worldwide, including some Maltese platforms.

Cloudflare, which supports millions of websites globally by improving performance, ensuring reliability, and protecting against cyber attacks, has faced growing scrutiny as dependency on its infrastructure deepens. Even short-lived outages can have widespread consequences across industries, from e-commerce and finance to communications and media.