A glitch at internet infrastructure firm Cloudflare knocked out a swathe of major websites on Friday morning, causing widespread outages for users trying to access services like LinkedIn, Zoom, Canva and Shopify.
The issue began shortly after 9am UK time, when Cloudflare reported problems with its dashboard and APIs. The company said users were experiencing "a large number of empty pages" and later confirmed it had rolled out a fix, though it continued monitoring the situation.
Even DownDetector, the site people use to check whether other sites are down, was itself offline for a time. After returning, it logged more than 4,500 outage reports tied to Cloudflare.
Cloudflare acts as the digital middleman for a huge share of the web, providing services that help websites load faster and stay secure. It claims its tools are used by around 20% of all websites. That reach means any hiccup can have immediate and global consequences.
Friday’s disruption came just three weeks after a separate Cloudflare issue took down platforms like X, ChatGPT, and Spotify.
Jake Moore, global cybersecurity adviser at ESET, said the incident exposes the fragility of the internet's underlying infrastructure. “It simply highlights there is one huge single point of failure in this legacy design,” he said.