A major infrastructure failure at the web giant has caused a global digital blackout for the second time in weeks, leaving millions unable to trade stocks, design graphics, or even check if the internet was working.
A widespread outage at internet infrastructure firm Cloudflare caused chaos across the global web on Friday (December 5), knocking out access to major platforms including Canva, Zoom, and Indian trading giants like Zerodha and Groww. The disruption, which triggered “500 Internal Server Errors” worldwide, was so severe that it even took down Downdetector, the very site users rely on to track such outages.
The trouble began around 09:00 UTC (14:30 IST) when Cloudflare’s scheduled maintenance at a data center in Detroit, USA, triggered unforeseen network instability. While the maintenance was intended to be routine, it caused a cascading failure in the company’s Dashboard and API services, effectively breaking the “digital handshake” between websites and their visitors.
The impact was immediate and indiscriminate. In India, panic spread among stock market traders as brokerage apps like Zerodha Kite, Angel One, and Upstox stopped functioning during active trading hours. Globally, productivity halted as design platform Canva and communication tool Zoom went offline. E-commerce sites and even the UK retailer Fortnum & Mason were reduced to error screens.
Cloudflare acknowledged the issue at 08:56 UTC, confirming that “scheduled maintenance is currently in progress” but had resulted in service degradation. Engineers rolled out a fix shortly after, with services beginning to recover by 09:30 UTC, though residual latency persisted for some users.
“Cloudflare global outage resolved. Kite services have been restored. You can now trade normally. We regret the inconvenience caused,” Zerodha posted on X, aiming to calm frustrated investors.
Social media users found dark humor in the situation. “You know it’s bad when you can’t even go to Downdetector to see what’s wrong because Downdetector uses Cloudflare,” one user posted on X. Another joked that a “new intern pushed the wrong button,” highlighting the fragility of the modern web.
This is the second major embarrassment for Cloudflare in less than a month. A similar “internal configuration error” on November 18 disrupted services for ChatGPT and Spotify, raising serious questions about the resilience of the centralized web.
Cloudflare acts as a “reverse proxy” for approximately 20% of the world’s websites, providing security and speed. However, this centralization means that when Cloudflare “sneezes,” a vast portion of the internet catches a cold. Today’s incident highlights the risks of this dependency, especially for critical financial services.
While services have largely returned to normal, business customers are likely to demand a detailed “Root Cause Analysis” (RCA) from Cloudflare in the coming days. Repeated outages of this scale could force major enterprises to reconsider their reliance on a single vendor for internet infrastructure.
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