Cloudflare has issued a public apology after a widespread outage on Friday morning disrupted major global platforms including LinkedIn, Zoom, Canva and Shopify. The incident marks the company’s second significant outage in less than a month, raising fresh concerns about the growing reliance on centralised internet infrastructure.

Outage triggered by firewall adjustment

In a detailed blogpost, Cloudflare stated that the outage resulted from a firewall configuration change undertaken to protect customers from a newly disclosed software vulnerability. The company clarified that the disruption was not the result of a cyberattack.

The outage, which affected nearly 28% of Cloudflare’s global traffic, lasted for around 30 minutes before being resolved shortly after 9am GMT. The company said a separate API issue had also been reported but was unrelated to the firewall change.

This disruption follows a much larger incident in mid-November, which temporarily took down major services including X, OpenAI, Spotify and multiplayer gaming platforms such as League of Legends.

November outage caused by software overload

Cloudflare has revealed that last month’s outage was caused by “a configuration file that is automatically generated to manage threat traffic,” which had grown larger than expected and triggered a critical software crash across multiple services.

“We have spoken directly with hundreds of customers following that incident and shared our plans to make changes to prevent single updates from causing widespread impact,” the company said.

Friday’s incident, while shorter and less severe, has reignited questions about the reliability of large-scale internet service providers that support a significant portion of global online traffic.

(Read more on infrastructure reliability here:
How global tech outages impact Indian users and businesses
Why the internet is increasingly dependent on centralised services)

Experts warn of risks in centralised internet systems

Technical experts have expressed increasing concern about the growing centralisation of internet infrastructure. Cloudflare currently provides services to around 20% of all websites, with nearly 300,000 customers in 125 countries, handling billions of cyber-attacks each day.

Steven Murdoch, Professor of Computer Science at University College London, said two outages in quick succession could prompt businesses to re-evaluate their dependence on Cloudflare.

“People will start asking questions now that there have been these two outages in a short period of time,” he said. “Cloudflare is apologetic, but it’s too early to say whether there’s a systemic problem or just bad luck.”

Cloudflare markets itself heavily on reliability and resilience—factors that draw companies to its services to guard against DDoS attacks, improve website performance and prevent server overloads.

However, the recent disruptions have fuelled a broader debate on whether key internet services are becoming too centralised and, therefore, too vulnerable to single points of failure.

‘Too big to not fail’: experts weigh in

Michał Woźniak, a DNS and internet infrastructure specialist, described the outage as another stark reminder of the fragility of large-scale internet systems.

“This again shows how brittle the big-tech internet is,” he said. “This is the fourth major global outage since 20 October.”

According to Woźniak, Cloudflare’s messaging about reliability is now under scrutiny. “These companies have become too big to not fail. And because they handle so much traffic, when they do fail, it immediately becomes a massive problem.”

Murdoch echoed concerns about centralisation but noted that outages can paradoxically highlight a company’s dominance. “When AWS went down, their share price went up, because people realised how many people are using them,” he said. “In some ways, an outage becomes great marketing because you see how many people depend on Cloudflare.”

Implications for businesses and internet users

Friday’s outage disrupted services across sectors—from videoconferencing to e-commerce—demonstrating how deeply Cloudflare’s infrastructure is embedded in global internet traffic.

Websites such as Canva, Shopify, the India-based broker Groww, LinkedIn, Zoom and Downdetector all experienced disruptions. Downdetector recorded over 4,500 reports after recovering from the outage, reflecting widespread user impact.

As businesses continue to embrace cloud-based systems for reliability, speed and cyber-security, experts say the recent outages may prompt companies to explore multi-provider strategies or reconsider how critical their dependence on a single service has become.