Another Cloudflare outage halts LinkedIn, Zoom and more — internet shockwave

Saturday, December 6, 2025 -On December 5, 2025, a global outage at Cloudflare disrupted major websites — including LinkedIn, Zoom, and several others — leaving millions of users without access for roughly 25 minutes. 

Cloudflare says the disruption affected about 28% of its global HTTP traffic, and triggered mass “500 Internal Server Error” messages for dozens of services worldwide. The outage followed a recent firewall update meant to address a newly disclosed software vulnerability, not a cyberattack.

Cloudflare explained that the outage arose from an internal configuration change: while updating its Web Application Firewall to mitigate the vulnerability, an internal tool was disabled — but the change propagated the network‑wide, causing parts of its proxy infrastructure to fail. 

The company quickly reverted the update around 09:12 UTC, restoring services within minutes, but the incident marks the second major outage in under a month.

The recurring outages are raising serious concerns about the concentration of internet infrastructure under a handful of providers. Critics warn that relying heavily on a single vendor like Cloudflare makes the global web fragile — a single misstep can take down large swathes of websites and apps at once. 

The disruption also highlighted how dependent individuals, businesses, and governments are on a few critical providers for access, security, and stability online.