Several websites using Cloudflare experienced widespread global outages on Friday (December 5), marking the internet infrastructure company's second massive outage issue within the past month.

Cloudflare, which had previously dealt with widespread outages on November 18, confirmed that it was "investigating issues with Cloudflare Dashboard and related APIs," but confirmed the issues weren't caused by an attack in a statement to the Associated Press. The company claimed that a change to its firewall request process “caused Cloudflare’s network to be unavailable for several minutes this morning.”

Websites reported to be affected by the Cloudflare outage on Friday included X (formerly Twitter), LinkedIn, Canva, Discord, Spotify, Zoom, Fortnite, Shopify, Coinbase and ChatGPT. DownDetector, a website that tracks widespread internet outages, was also reported to be affected before later reporting a spike in Cloudflare outages in the early morning hours.

Cloudflare is reported to have 7,591,745 active websites and accounts for 32.8% of the top 10,000 most popular global websites with 4.1 million customers, including 119,206 paying customers. The company had previously dealt with issues on November 18, claiming "a fix" had "been implemented and we believe the incident is now resolved" shortly after.

"Cloudflare is experiencing an internal service degradation. Some services may be intermittently impacted. We are focused on restoring service. We will update as we are able to remediate. More updates to follow shortly," the company said at the time.

KT Tunstall

with Emily Scott Robinson