Cloudflare Suffers Second Outage in a Month Amid Global Scheduled Maintenance
Cloudflare, the U.S.-based web security and Content Delivery Network (CDN) provider, suffered another brief outage on December 5, 2025, marking its second disruption in less than a month. The incident caused connectivity issues across multiple platforms globally, with several services displaying “500 internal server errors.”
Partial Global Disruption Hits Multiple Platforms
Although the outage did not affect the entire internet, several websites and platforms experienced service interruptions. Cloudflare’s own official website was unreachable for several minutes, underscoring the severity of the disruption.
During the blackout, the monitoring platform Downdetector was also inaccessible, a strong indication that Cloudflare’s infrastructure degradation disrupted essential internet monitoring tools.
This latest incident follows a major Cloudflare outage in November 2025, which brought down global platforms including:
- X (formerly Twitter)
- ChatGPT
- Spotify
- Canva
- Perplexity AI
The November outage also affected major Nigerian news outlets such as PUNCH, Vanguard, The Nation, TheCable, Daily Trust, and The Guardian Nigeria.
500 Errors Hint at Core Server-Side Failures
The widespread “500 internal server error” messages confirmed that the issue originated on the server side—not from users’ devices or local internet connections. Platforms dependent on Cloudflare’s network infrastructure were unable to route traffic normally during the disruption.
Cloudflare Status Page Shows Ongoing Scheduled Maintenance
While Cloudflare has not issued an official public statement about the latest incident, activity on its System Status page showed that the company was performing multiple scheduled maintenance operations.
An update posted at 07:00 UTC (Dec 05, 2025) stated:
“Scheduled maintenance is currently in progress… We will be performing scheduled maintenance in the ORD (Chicago) datacenter on 2025-12-05 between 07:00 and 11:00 UTC.”
Though the maintenance was initially expected to affect only the Chicago region, further updates revealed additional work being carried out in:
- Detroit
- Bogotá
These expanded maintenance activities likely contributed to broader-than-expected service instability.
Cloudflare Investigates Increased Errors
At 09:53 UTC, Cloudflare released a new update, noting two emerging issues:
- “Large number of empty pages when using the list API on a Workers KV namespace.”
- Increased errors affecting customers running Cloudflare Workers scripts.
The company stated it is actively investigating:
“Cloudflare is investigating an increased level of errors for customers running Workers scripts. We are working to analyse and mitigate this problem.”
Concerns Grow Over Reliance on Cloudflare
Given Cloudflare’s position as a crucial backbone of global internet infrastructure, outages of this nature have immediate cascading effects across the web. Some experts are now urging website owners and enterprises to consider alternative providers or redundancy strategies to reduce their vulnerability.
This latest disruption comes shortly after an AWS global outage in October 2025, which impacted major platforms including Grammarly, Snapchat, and Reddit, reinforcing concerns about the fragility of the internet’s backbone services.
