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The internet faced significant disruption today. Cloudflare went down, and it took a large portion of the web offline with it. Reportedly, the outage began around 02:00 PM Pakistan Standard Time today, Friday, December 5, 2025.
Users attempting to access their favourite platforms faced frustration. Instead of expected content, visitors were seeing a “500 internet server error” warning on numerous pages. This latest technical failure highlights how fragile the web’s infrastructure can be. However, Cloudflare is back online now, along with all the other affected platforms.
The outage affected many high-profile websites. X, the newsletter platform Substack, and the design tool Canva all appeared to be down. Notably, the tracking website Down Detector also went offline, ironically leaving users without a way to check the status of the outage.
Cloudflare provides essential web infrastructure services. It powers many of the world’s biggest websites by sitting between the page and the visitor to manage heavy traffic. Consequently, when Cloudflare crashes, it immediately takes down many seemingly unconnected websites.
The timing couldn’t have been worse. Just two-and-a-half weeks ago, Cloudflare suffered major issues that took it offline for hours. This previous outage also broke sites worldwide.
However, not everyone went dark this time. ChatGPT remained functional during this crash. Presumably, the platform made itself less reliant on Cloudflare following the major outage last month.
