Cloudflare’s Double Failure Exposed a Hard Truth About the Internet

Round 1: November 18, 2025

A bug in Cloudflare's Bot Management system caused a configuration file to grow to twice its normal size, which then crashed the network. Think of it like trying to load a massive file onto every machine at once; they all failed under the load.

What broke: Roughly one in five webpages went dark, affecting about one third of the world's 10,000 most popular sites. This impacted platforms such as Twitter, ChatGPT, Spotify, Zoom, Coinbase, and even Downdetector.

Round 2: December 5, 2025

Seventeen days later, while attempting to fix a security vulnerability in React Server Components, Cloudflare made configuration changes that triggered another crash lasting about 25 minutes. This outage affected 28 percent of all HTTP traffic served by Cloudflare.

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The Aftermath: When One Falls, We All Fall

The financial impact across major services was estimated between 180 to 360 million dollars in direct revenue loss, but this was only part of the total damage.

E-commerce impact: The outage occurred just before Black Friday, forcing many retailers to halt or reduce high spending advertising campaigns. Shopify alone suffered more than 4 million dollars in direct losses, with downstream merchant impacts potentially exceeding 170 million dollars. It was equivalent to every online store in a major district shutting down during the biggest shopping day of the year.

Workplace disruption: Failed user logins, broken single sign on flows, and portal timeouts locked users out of essential services. Support centers became overwhelmed. Engineers spent hours troubleshooting problems that were not on their side. Large enterprises typically lose between 5,600 and 9,000 dollars per minute of downtime. For an outage lasting between 3 to 6 hours, the losses were substantial.

Trust damage: Research indicates that 88 percent of users are less likely to return to a website after a bad experience. Importantly, users do not blame Cloudflare when a site goes down; they blame the business whose website they attempted to visit. Reputations suffered even though the cause was external.

A major point of confusion was that many developers initially suspected their own systems, spending valuable time debugging issues that did not exist. Services would briefly recover, then fail again, which made diagnosis even more difficult.

The Uncomfortable Truth

Cloudflare handles almost 20 percent of worldwide web traffic. When it experiences a failure, the outage indirectly touches an estimated 2.4 billion monthly active users across major platforms.

Despite common assumptions about redundancy and decentralization, the internet is heavily dependent on a small number of infrastructure providers such as Cloudflare, AWS, and Azure. The incident highlights how interconnected and fragile the system truly is. A single misconfigured permission or update can disrupt global communications for hours.

The modern internet is fast and highly capable, but it is also far more centralized and vulnerable than it appears.