Cloudflare Outage Disrupts Global Services

Cloudflare, a major global web infrastructure provider, experienced a widespread outage on December 5, 2025, disrupting access to numerous websites and online services around the world. The incident, which began early in the morning UTC time, affected users from the United States to the United Arab Emirates, where it stalled operations in several offices as content management systems and applications failed to load.

The outage started around 8:56 a.m. UTC, when Cloudflare reported issues with its Dashboard and related APIs. Customers attempting to use these tools encountered failures, with requests timing out or displaying errors. Many websites powered by Cloudflare's network displayed a 500 Internal Server Error message, indicating a server-side problem rather than issues with individual users' connections. The disruption coincided with scheduled maintenance at Cloudflare's datacenter in Chicago's O'Hare International Airport area, which ran from 7:00 a.m. to 11:00 a.m. UTC and involved rerouting traffic that could lead to temporary latency. One report indicated the problem stemmed from an automatically generated configuration file intended to manage potential security threats.