This Friday morning, many Internet users believed there was a breakdown in their box or their network. However, the cause was much more global. At the root of the problem: Cloudflare, one of the invisible pillars of the Internet, responsible for securing and optimizing the traffic of countless websites around the world. As of 10 a.m., thousands of sites were displaying the dreaded “500 Internal Server Error” alert.
“Cloudflare is down again. This Friday, December 5, 2025, the American giant encountered a major malfunction,” summarizes 01net. Among the victims of the outage: Canva, Perplexity, Microsoft Copilot, Garmin, Doctolib, OnlyFans, LinkedIn, and even Downdetector, ironically supposed to detect this type of incident.
The same scenario as in November: poorly controlled maintenance
This isn’t the first time Cloudflare has gone off the rails. Less than a month ago, another outage was caused by a configuration error when managing robot detection files. This time again, the first elements point to internal maintenance, initiated without prior warning, which would have caused a domino effect.
“It was already the same cause the last time. In fact, we would be tempted to believe that their routines are clearly not well established,” quips Frandroid in his article today. Two similar incidents in such a short time inevitably raise the question of the reliability of Cloudflare’s internal processes.
The extent of the outage: a paralyzed web and frustrated users
The impact was global and massive. The server error crippled access to Cloudflare APIs, which was enough to take entire swathes of the Internet offline. “Cloudflare indicates that it has opened an investigation into the problem that occurred” and quickly deployed a fix, monitoring the evolution of the situation in real time.
On social networks, reactions were quick. Between frustration and humor, Internet users highlighted the irony of an outage so widespread that it took out of service the sites supposed to track… outages. “Even Downdetector is down! The site which makes it possible to identify service outages is itself down. A shame!”, summarizes Frandroid.
Cloudflare, this giant that everyone depends on without knowing it
Cloudflare is not just a hosting provider. It acts as a traffic gatekeeper for millions of sites. Thanks to its servers located around the world, it filters attacks, optimizes page loading and manages domain names. In the event of a fault or misconfiguration, an entire digital ecosystem can collapse in succession.
“Customers using the Cloudflare dashboard and APIs are impacted: queries may fail and/or errors may be displayed,” the company acknowledges. This new incident reminds us of the extent to which the Internet relies on a few key infrastructures, often opaque to the general public.