Closing post
Time to wrap up.
Global cloud services and cybersecurity firm Cloudflare has admitted it ‘let the internet down’ after a new outage hit the web today.
A host of websites including LinkedIn, Zoom and Downdetector went offline on Friday morning after fresh problems at Cloudflare – the company’s second outage in less than a month.
Cloudflare has blamed the outage on changes being made to its systems as it tried to detect and mitigate an industry-wide security vulnerability.
Chief technical officer Dane Knecht said:
Any outage of our systems is unacceptable, and we know we have let the Internet down again following the incident on November 18. We will be publishing details next week about the work we are doing to stop these types of incidents from occurring.
IT experts said the outage showed the dangers of relying on a small number of cloud infrastructures across the world.
In other news…
A separate IT problem with air traffic control forced flights at Edinburgh airport to be suspended this morning.
Netflix has agreed to buy Warner Bros Discovery in an $82.7bn (£62bn) deal that will dramatically reshape the established Hollywood film and TV industry.
Tesla has launched the lower-priced version of its Model 3 car in Europe in a push to revive sales after a backlash against Elon Musk’s work with Donald Trump and weakening demand for electric vehicles.
Elon Musk’s social media platform, X, has been fined €120m (£105m) after it was found in breach of new EU digital laws.
Buyers attempting to get on to the property ladder in the UK have received a lift, after figures from Halifax showed they are in the best position to snap up a home in a decade.
FTSE 100 ends day in the red
Back in the markets, the UK’s blue-chpi share index has ended the day down almost 0.5%.
The FTSE 100 share index has closed down 9667 points at 9667 points tonight.
Engineering group Smiths (-3.5%) were the top faller, after agreeing to sell its security screening division, Smiths Detection, to funds advised by CVC Capital Partners for £2bn.
They were followed by Metlen Energy (-2.7%) and oil giant BP (-2.6%).
A remorseful-sounding Cloudflare has also pledged to publish a detailed breakdown of all the resiliency projects underway.
CTO Dane Knecht writes:
While that work is underway, we are locking down all changes to our network in order to ensure we have better mitigation and rollback systems before we begin again.
These kinds of incidents, and how closely they are clustered together, are not acceptable for a network like ours. On behalf of the team at Cloudflare we want to apologize for the impact and pain this has caused again to our customers and the Internet as a whole.
Cloudstrike: we have let the Internet down again
Cloudflare has admitted that it “let the internet down again” after today’s outage.
In a blogpost explaining what went wrong today, Cloudflare says a coding error to its Web Application Firewall (WAF) occured as it tried to protect users against a critical vulnerability.
This error led to disruption to some Cloudflare customers, depending on their network configuration.
Cloudflare explains that this is “a straightforward error in the code, which had existed undetected for many years,”.
Chief technical officer Dane Knecht explains:
On December 5, 2025, at 08:47 UTC, a portion of Cloudflare’s network began experiencing significant failures. The incident was resolved at 09:12 (~25 minutes total impact), when all services were fully restored.
A subset of customers were impacted, accounting for approximately 28% of all HTTP traffic served by Cloudflare. Several factors needed to combine for an individual customer to be affected as described below.
The issue was not caused, directly or indirectly, by a cyber attack on Cloudflare’s systems or malicious activity of any kind. Instead, it was triggered by changes being made to our body parsing logic while attempting to detect and mitigate an industry-wide vulnerability disclosed this week in React Server Components.
Any outage of our systems is unacceptable, and we know we have let the Internet down again following the incident on November 18. We will be publishing details next week about the work we are doing to stop these types of incidents from occurring.
Knecht adds that this is unrelated to the change that caused a similar, longer availability incident 18 November:
In both cases, a deployment to help mitigate a security issue for our customers propagated to our entire network and led to errors for nearly all of our customer base.
US PCE inflation index lower than forecast
New economic data from the US has bolstered hopes of cuts to interest rates as soon as next week.
The core personal consumption expenditures price index, the Federal Reserve’s preferred inflation mesure, rose by 2.8% per year in September, 0.1 percentage point lower than expected.
New official data alsos shows Americans reined in their purchases in September; spending rose 0.3% month-on-month, but was flat after accounting for inflation.
Row as EC fines X
Elsewhere in the tech world, Elon Musk’s social media platform, X, has been fined €120m for breaching EU digital laws, triggering clash between the EU and Donald Trump’s administration.
X was fined for breaching EU online content rules, including through the deceptive design of its blue checkmark for verified accounts, the lack of transparency of its advertising repository and its failure to provide researchers access to public data.
President Donald Trump’s envoy to the European Union accused the bloc of unfairly targeting American tech giants
Andrew Puzder, the US ambassador to the EU, told Bloomberg TV:
“The only substantial meaningful fines that have been imposed so far have been against American companies.”
Vice-president JD Vance also objected. Before the fine was announced, he posted on X:
Rumors swirling that the EU commission will fine X hundreds of millions of dollars for not engaging in censorship. The EU should be supporting free speech not attacking American companies over garbage.
Rumors swirling that the EU commission will fine X hundreds of millions of dollars for not engaging in censorship. The EU should be supporting free speech not attacking American companies over garbage.
— JD Vance (@JDVance) December 4, 2025
In the City, the pound is trading near the six-week high reached yesterday.
A stronger-than-expected survey of UK purchasing managers on Wednesday, and relief that the budget has finally been delivered, have helped the pound.
It’s up a third of a cent today at $1.3350.
Matthew Ryan, head of market strategy at global financial services firm Ebury, explains:
The upward revision to the November PMI figures has raised hopes that Britain’s economy is not slowing by quite the extent that market participants had feared, albeit with the caveat that we’re still looking at relatively muted levels of growth, way below where policymakers would hope that we’d be.
“Yet, with the economy continuing to trundle along, and with the uncertainty surrounding the budget now largely in the rear view mirror, sterling has found some welcome breathing room. Focus will quickly shift to the December meeting of the Bank of England, with another 25 basis point cut already almost entirely baked in by markets. Focus surrounding the decision will instead be on where the bank sees rates going in 2026.”
Cloudflare’s outage shows the need for multi-region architecture to protect global services, argues Professor Feng Li, Associate Dean for Research & Innovation at Bayes Business School.
“The Cloudflare outage is yet another reminder of how dependent major systems are on just a few cloud infrastructures across the world.
“This latest episode, coupled with October’s AWS outage and the disruption that caused, should serve as yet another wake-up call for cloud providers to strengthen regional isolation, ensure critical control planes can fail safely, and maintain communicational transparency with users during such incidents. This last point is critical because confidence in the provider often depends as much on timely, clear updates as on the speed of recovery itself.
“For far too long now, people have used cloud services as a single point of reliability rather than accepting shared responsibility. With such dire consequences globally, multi-region or multi-cloud architecture must be implemented as a rapid failover. Incident response and customer communication plans should assume provider outages are a matter of when and not if.
“Cloudflare will inevitably be the subject of user frustration and business disruption. However, the longer-term erosion of confidence in cloud infrastructure and the broader digital ecosystem is far bigger problem.
“This latest outage continues to beg the question of what happens when a digital infrastructure collapse in one part of the world can have such globally significant consequences? It is a question that regulators, enterprises, and researchers alike need to confront.”
Netflix agrees to buy Warner Bros Discovery's studios and streaming division
Big news in the world of media: Netflix has agreed to buy Warner Bros Discovery’s TV and film studios and streaming division for $72bn.
The deal, worth $82.7bn once debt is included, means Netflix have beaten Paramount Skydance and Comcast to take control of one of Hollywood’s most prized and oldest assets, a move that will change the established film and TV landscape.
Announcing the deal, the two companies say:
This acquisition brings together two pioneering entertainment businesses, combining Netflix’s innovation, global reach and best-in-class streaming service with Warner Bros.’ century-long legacy of world-class storytelling.
Beloved franchises, shows and movies such as The Big Bang Theory, The Sopranos, Game of Thrones, The Wizard of Oz and the DC Universe will join Netflix’s extensive portfolio including Wednesday, Money Heist, Bridgerton, Adolescence and Extraction, creating an extraordinary entertainment offering for audiences worldwide.
Here’s our news story on today’s Cloudflare outage:
Canva, the online graphic design tool, says its services have “fully recovered following the Cloudflare outage”.
All systems are now operational, Canva reports, after being taken down by the Cloudflare outage.
Jake Moore, global cybersecurity adviser at ESET, has summed up the problem:
“If a major provider like Cloudflare goes down for any reason, thousands of websites instantly become unreachable.
“The problems often lie with the fact we are using an old network to direct internet users around the world to websites but it simply highlights there is one huge single point of failure in this legacy design.”
The Metro newspaper reports that shopping sites wer affected by the Cloudflare IT problems too – such as Shopify, Etsy, Wayfair, and H&M.
H&M’s website is slow to load right now, but the other three seem to be working…
Today’s Cloudflare outage is likely to intensify concerns that internet users are relying on too few technology providers.
Tim Wright, technology partner at Fladgate, explains:
“Cloudflare’s latest outage is another reminder that much of the internet runs through just a few hands. Businesses betting on “always-on” cloud resilience are discovering its single points of failure. Repeated disruptions will draw tougher scrutiny from regulators given DORA, NIS2, and the UK’s emerging operational resilience regimes.
Dependence on a small set of intermediaries may be efficient but poses a structural risk the digital economy cannot ignore. We can expect regulators to probe the concentration of critical functions in the cloud and edge layers — while businesses rethink whether convenience has quietly outpaced control.”
Cloudflare: this was not an attack
Cloudflare’s System Status page shows that the problem that knocked many websites offline has been resolved.
Cloudflare insists the problem was not a cyber attack; instead, it appears to have been caused by a deliberate change made by its firewall handles data requests, to fix a security vulnerability.
Cloudflare says:
This incident has been resolved.
A change made to how Cloudflare’s Web Application Firewall parses requests caused Cloudflare’s network to be unavailable for several minutes this morning. This was not an attack; the change was deployed by our team to help mitigate the industry-wide vulnerability disclosed this week in React Server Components. We will share more information as we have it today.
Edinburgh Airport suspends all flights after IT issue with air traffic control
An IT issue affecting air traffic control has forced Edinburgh Airport to halt all flights today.
Edinburgh Airport said in a statement:
“No flights are currently operating from Edinburgh Airport.
“Teams are working on the issue and will resolve as soon as possible.”
— Edinburgh Airport (@EDI_Airport) December 5, 2025
The Airport’s departure page is showing eight flights delayed and five cancelled, but passengers for many other flights are being told to go to the gate.
Reports of problems at Cloudflare peaked at just after 9am UK time:
Online video conferencing service Zoom, and Transport for London’s website (used for travel information in the capital), are among the sites hit by the Cloudflare outage.
Updated
Global websites down as Cloudflare investigates fresh issues
Technical problems at internet infrastructure provider Cloudflare today have taken a host of websites offline this morning.
Cloudflare said shortly after 9am UK time that it “is investigating issues with Cloudflare Dashboard and related APIs [application programming interfaces – used when apps exchange data with each other].
Cloudflare has also reported it has implemented a potential fix to the issue and is monitoring the results.
But the outage has affected a number of websites and platforms, with reports of problems accessing LinkedIn, X, Canva – and even the DownDetector site used to monitor online service issues.
Last month, an outage at Cloudflare made many websites inaccessible for about three hours.
Updated
In a separate cereal supply and demand report, the FAO raised its global cereal production forecast for 2025 to a record 3.003 billion metric tons.
That’s up from 2.990 billion tons projected last month, mainly due to increased estimates for wheat output.
The FAO’s forecast for world cereal stocks at the end of the 2025/26 season has also been revised up to a record 925.5 million tons, reflecting expectations of expanded wheat stocks in China and India as well as higher coarse grain stocks in exporting countries.
World food prices fall for third month in a row
Global food prices have fallen for the third month running.
The UN’s Food Price Index, which tracks a basket of food commodities, dropped by 1.2% in November, thanks to a drop in the cost of dairy products, meat, sugar and vegetable oils.
That could help to push down inflation, if these reductions are passed onto consumers.
However, cereal prices rose by 1.8% last month, due to “potential Chinese interest in supplies from the United States of America, concerns over continuing hostilities in the Black Sea region, and expectations of reduced plantings in the Russian Federation”, the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation reports.
Vegetable oil prices fell by 2.6% in the month, to a five-month low, due to prices of palm, rapeseed and sunflower oils.
Meat prices dropped by 0.8%, driven by lower pig and poultry meat prices and the the removal of tariffs on beef imports into the US.
Dairy prices fell by 3.1% in November, thanks to rising milk production and abundant export supplies in key producing regions, supported by ample butter and skim milk powder inventories in the European Union and seasonally higher output in New Zealand.
Sugar prices dropped by 5.9% in the month, and were almost 30% lower than a year ago., as expectations of ample global sugar supplies in the current season pushed down prices. Strong production in Brazil’s key southern growing regions, a good early season start to India’s harvest and favourable crop prospects in Thailand all contributed.
European shares higher ahead of US PCE inflation report
European stock markets are ending the week on the front foot.
The main European indices are a little higher this morning; Germany’s DAX is up 0.55%, France’s CAC 40 is 0.3% higher, and the UK’s FTSE 100 has risen by 0.14%.
Investors are waiting for new US inflation data later today (1.30pm UK time), which could influence interest rate expectations ahead of next week’s US Federal Reserve meeting.
Kyle Rodda, senior financial market analyst at capital.com, says:
Risk assets are cautiously edging higher to round out the week, with US PCE Index data in focus this afternoon.
Ultimately, the markets appear to be looking for a signal that it’s all clear to keep moving higher again. That signal could come from data. But given the lack of it between now and the middle of next week, it’s more likely to come from the FOMC decision.
The current implied probabilities of a cut are 87%, according to FedWatch – swaps markets suggest a little higher. The markets won’t just want to see a cut delivered but also some dovish enough language and forecasts about the prospect of future cuts. Another hawkish cut, like that which was seen in October, could upset the apple cart, if it were to occur.
Nevertheless, European stocks have run with a broadly positive lead-in from Asian markets, with US futures also pointing higher
Warner Bros Discovery has entered exclusive talks to sell its streaming and Hollywood studio business to Netflix, a move that would dramatically change the established film and TV landscape.
Netflix is in competition with Paramount Skydance and Comcast, which owns assets including Universal Studios and Sky, to buy the owner of the Hollywood studio Warner Bros, HBO and the HBO Max streaming service.
Netflix is offering a $5bn (£3.7bn) breakup fee if the deal fails to gain regulatory approval in the US, according to Bloomberg, which first reported the exclusive talks.
Ocado shares jump 11% after agreeing $350m payment from Kroger
Shares in Ocado have jumped by over 10% at the start of trading, after it agreed a compensation deal with US grocer Kroger.
Ocado is to receive a one-off $350m cash payment from Kroger, which decided last month to close three robotic warehouses which use the UK company’s high-tech equipment, in Maryland, Wisconsin, and Florida.
That decision, announced in mid-November, had knocked 17% off Ocado’s shares.
This morning, though, they’ve jumped to the top of the FTSE 250 index, up 11.5% to 206p.
Ocado had previously said it expected to receive more than $250m in compensation from Kroger.
But it has also revealed today that Kroger has decided to cancel another tie-up with Ocado – a planned automated distribution centre run on the UK group’s technology in Charlotte, North Carolina.
Last month, retail analyst Clive Black of Shore Capital said Ocado was “being marginalised as most of its customer fulfilment centres do not work economically in the USA”.
Ocado says it continues to “work closely” with Kroger on five other customer fulfillment centres in US states such as Texas and Michigan.
Tim Steiner, CEO of Ocado Group, has said:
“We continue to invest significant resources to support our partners at Kroger, and to help them build on our longstanding partnership. Ocado’s technology has evolved significantly to include both the new technologies that Kroger is currently deploying in its CFC network, as well as new fulfilment products that bring Ocado’s technology to a wider range of applications, including Store Based Automation to support ‘pick up’ and immediacy.”
Our partners around the world have already deployed a wide range of these fulfilment technologies to great effect, enabling them to address a wide spectrum of geographies, population densities and online shopping missions, underpinned by Ocado’s world leading expertise and R&D capabilities. We remain excited about the opportunity for Ocado’s evolving products in the US market.”
House prices predicted to rise in 2026, after budget uncertainty
Halifax’s Amanda Bryden reckons UK house prices will rise “gradually” next year, saying:
“Looking ahead, with market activity steady and expectations of further interest rate reductions to come, we anticipate property prices will continue to grow gradually into 2026.”
Karen Noye, mortgage expert at Quilter, says affordability remains the biggest hurdle, even though inflation has eased and another interest rate cut is expected later this month, adding:
The outlook for 2026 rests on the path of mortgage rates and the resilience of household incomes. Greater clarity post budget and the prospect of lower borrowing costs give the market a firmer footing, but affordability will remain the defining constraint.”
Tom Bill, head of UK residential research at Knight Frank, blames pre-Budget uncertainty pushed house price growth close to zero, adding:
Clarity has now returned, but an array of tax rises, which include an income tax threshold freeze, will increasingly squeeze demand and prices. Offsetting that is the fact that mortgage rates are expected to drift lower next year as the base rate bottoms out at around 3.25%.”
Technically, UK house prices did rise slightly last month. On Halifax’s data, the average price was £299,892, marginally up from £299,754 in October. That’s a new record high on this index.
Halifax: a clear North/South divide on house price changes
Halifax’s regional data continues to show a clear North/South divide – prices fell in the south of the UK last month, but were stronger elsewhere.
Northern Ireland remains the strongest performing nation or region in the UK, with average property prices rising by +8.9% over the past year (up from +7.9% last month). The typical home now costs £220,716.
Scotland recorded annual price growth of +3.7% in November, up to an average of £216,781. In Wales property values rose +1.9% year-on-year to £229,430.
In England, the North West recorded the highest annual growth rate, with property prices rising by +3.2% to £245,070, followed by the North East with growth of +2.9% to £180,939. Further south, three regions saw prices decrease in November.
In London prices fell by -1.0%, the South East by -0.3% and Eastern England by -0.1%. The capital remains the most expensive part of the UK, with an average property now costing £539,766.
Introduction: UK house prices stagnated in November, weak retail spending too
Good morning, and welcome to our rolling coverage of business, the financial markets and the world economy.
As the first week of December draws to a close, we have fresh evidence that the economy cooled in the run-up to last month’s budget.
UK house prices were broadly unchanged in November, lender Halifax reports, with that average property changing hands for £299,892. That stagnation follows a 0.5% rise in October, and makes houses slightly more affordable to new buyers.
On an annual basis, prices were 0.7% higher – down from +1.9% house price inflation in October.
Amanda Bryden, head of mortgages at Halifax, explains:
“This consistency in average prices reflects what has been one of the most stable years for the housing market over the last decade. Even with the changes to Stamp Duty back in spring and some uncertainty ahead of the Autumn Budget, property values have remained steady.
While slower growth may disappoint some existing homeowners, it’s welcome news for first-time buyers. Comparing property prices to average incomes, affordability is now at its strongest since late 2015. Taking into account today’s higher interest rates, mortgage costs as a share of income are at their lowest level in around three years.
Shoppers also reined in their spending in the shops last month.
A survey by business advisory service BDO has found that in-store sales grew by just +1.3% in November, despite the potential sales boost from Black Friday.
That is well below the rate of inflation which means that sales volumes are significantly down, BDO says.
The agenda
7am GMT: Halifax house price index for November
7am GMT: German factory orders data for October
8.30am GMT: UN food commodities price index
3pm GMT: US PCE inflation report
3pm GMT: University of Michigan consumer confidence report
Updated
