London, December 5, 2025 — Internet users worldwide faced fresh disruption today as both Cloudflare, a leading content delivery and security provider, and Downdetector, the popular outage‑tracking platform, went offline at the same time.
The incident has caused widespread confusion. Cloudflare’s infrastructure underpins millions of websites, while Downdetector is the go‑to service for verifying whether platforms are experiencing downtime. With both services unavailable, users were left without clarity on the scale of the disruption.
This marks the second major outage for Cloudflare in just two weeks. On November 18, 2025, a misconfigured update to its Bot Management system triggered cascading failures across its proxy services, knocking out access to major platforms including X, ChatGPT, and Shopify for several hours. Today’s outage compounds concerns about the resilience of internet infrastructure when so much traffic depends on a handful of providers.
Websites relying on Cloudflare began timing out or displaying error messages, while Downdetector itself failed to load, preventing users from confirming the scope of the problem. Social media quickly filled with speculation, but without Downdetector’s centralised reporting, misinformation spread rapidly.
Businesses dependent on Cloudflare saw interruptions to traffic and services, while everyday users were left frustrated and uncertain. The simultaneous failure of a major CDN and its primary outage‑reporting tool underscores the fragility of the systems that keep the internet running smoothly.
As of publication, neither Cloudflare nor Downdetector has issued an official statement. Industry experts note that back‑to‑back outages of this scale are rare and may point to deeper systemic issues or vulnerabilities in global routing.