Online services worldwide experienced significant disruptions on Friday, December 5, 2025, as Cloudflare, a major internet infrastructure provider, suffered a widespread outage. This incident marked the second such disruption in recent months, causing considerable inconvenience for users across various sectors, including finance, productivity, and communication.

Online brokerage firm Zerodha was among the first to acknowledge the impact, stating that Cloudflare's cross-platform downtime was responsible for the sudden outage on its Kite trading platform. Cloudflare later confirmed that parts of its network were experiencing interruptions due to planned maintenance work, which commenced at 09:00 UTC on December 5. The company also announced it was investigating a rise in errors affecting customers running Workers scripts, with updates promised as the situation evolved.

The outage severely affected major Indian online brokerage firms, including Zerodha, Groww, Angel One, and Upstox, all of which depend on Cloudflare for their network infrastructure. Traders faced login failures, delayed trades, and periods of total unavailability during crucial market hours. Zerodha proactively advised its customers to utilize the Kite WhatsApp backup service to manage their trades during the disruption, later apologizing for the inconvenience once services were restored.

The impact extended far beyond the financial sector, affecting a diverse range of companies and applications. Non-trading entities such as the AI chatbot Claude, information platforms like Perplexity, travel services like MakeMyTrip, e-commerce platforms like Shopify, communication tools such as Zoom, and even gaming services like Valorant, all reported issues. Global editing and productivity platforms were also hit, with Canva and QuillBot becoming inaccessible. Previous Cloudflare-related disruptions had similarly impacted major global platforms, including X (formerly Twitter), ChatGPT, Spotify, and PayPal.

Later in the day, Cloudflare confirmed that a fix had been implemented and they were monitoring the results. Following this, Zerodha announced that the global outage had been resolved and Kite services were fully restored, enabling traders to resume normal operations. "Cloudflare global outage resolved. Kite services have been restored. You can now trade normally. We regret the inconvenience caused," Zerodha posted on X.

Industry outage tracker Downdetector reported more than 2,100 incidents of Cloudflare-related disruptions on Friday afternoon, with reports surging from 1:50 p.m. onwards. Users reported issues ranging from website outages and server connection problems to hosting difficulties. The sheer volume of complaints even briefly overwhelmed Downdetector itself, rendering it inaccessible as users rushed to verify service statuses.

Netizens reacted with widespread frustration and concern over the repeated outages. Social media platforms were flooded with complaints, with users questioning the reliability of Cloudflare and the availability of alternatives. Comments such as "Is there no alternative to Cloudflare? I think their definition of making the internet safe is making the internet inaccessible," and "at this point @Cloudflare is taking down our sites more than hackers," highlighted the growing exasperation with recurrent service interruptions impacting vital online infrastructure.