A wave of 500 Internal Server Errors swept across the internet on 5 December 2025, knocking offline major banks, stock trading platforms, e-commerce giants, and video conferencing tools — marking Cloudflare's second significant outage within three weeks.
The San Francisco-based infrastructure provider, responsible for managing approximately 20% of global web traffic, confirmed that the incident began at 08:47 UTC and persisted for around 25 minutes before engineers rolled back a problematic configuration change. According to Cloudflare's own post-mortem report, the disruption impacted roughly 28% of all HTTP traffic routed through the company's network.
