This Friday morning has once again demonstrated how much of the Internet depends on just a handful of infrastructure providers. A new outage at Cloudflare, the U.S.-based multinational cybersecurity and network services company, has taken platforms like Zoom, Canva, and online gaming services such as Fortnite, Valorant, League of Legends, and Epic Games Store offline or experiencing intermittent issues.
According to initial reports on Downdetector, the issues began to be noticeable around 8:00 AM (Spanish mainland time), though the volume of complaints surged especially after 10:00 AM, with users worldwide reporting connection errors, blank pages, and services that wouldn’t fully load.
In Spain, despite Cloudflare’s significance as an infrastructure layer, several local providers consulted indicate that, for now, the impact on services that rely on Cloudflare has been limited and not widespread, at least during the initial phase of the incident.
What is failing in Cloudflare
Cloudflare has acknowledged the problem on its status page, under the section “Workers Issues”. The company states it is investigating “a high level of errors for customers running Workers scripts” and also reports “a large number of empty pages when using the listings API in Workers KV namespaces.”
In practice, this means many applications and websites relying on Cloudflare Workers—the company’s edge compute platform—may be returning errors, timeouts, or blank screens. Simultaneously, the company admits issues with its Control Panel and APIs, complicating the management and deployment of changes by administrators during the incident.
Although no detailed technical report has been made public yet, all signs point to a failure in key components of Cloudflare’s serverless platform, which, due to its intermediary position between users and final services, ends up affecting a significant number of websites and applications.
Second major outage in two weeks
The incident comes just two weeks after another significant Cloudflare outage on November 18th, when services like X, ChatGPT, Canva, and numerous websites were inaccessible or experienced widespread failures for about four hours. On that occasion, the company attributed the problem to an internal degradation after an unusual traffic spike, ruling out cyberattacks or security breaches.
Repeated outages within such a short period highlight concerns about the resilience of the global Internet infrastructure and the over-reliance on a few big cloud providers. Cloudflare has become an essential part of the network, acting as a CDN (Content Delivery Network), web application firewall, reverse proxy, and compute platform for millions of sites. When one of these components falters, the domino effect is immediate.
A problem that extends beyond Cloudflare
This case isn’t isolated. In recent months, there have also been significant outages at other major cloud providers, such as AWS (Amazon Web Services) and Microsoft Azure, impacting streaming services, e-commerce, SaaS tools, and internal platforms critical for companies worldwide.
The trend is concerning: increasingly, both corporate and consumer services are concentrated on a small number of infrastructure platforms. While this offers advantages in cost, performance, and security, it also creates a single point of failure, transforming any incident into a systemic issue.
For system administrators and IT managers, episodes like this reopen discussions on:
- Multicloud or hybrid provider strategies (e.g., combining different CDNs or load balancing across multiple clouds).
- Clear contingency plans for when the main CDN or provider fails.
- Using fallback routes that temporarily bypass critical external services during severe degradation.
Currently limited impact in Spain
Although well-known names like Zoom and Fortnite are experiencing issues globally, the effect in the Spanish market appears, for now, less severe than might be expected from a Cloudflare outage. Some providers using the platform for parts of their services and to end-users report uneven impact, with many sites still functioning normally—likely thanks to caching mechanisms, alternative routes, or because they don’t rely heavily on the most affected parts of Cloudflare (such as Workers).
Nevertheless, the incident serves as a reminder to the Spanish business sector—where more small and large companies are delegating their online presence and critical services to hosting and cloud providers—of the importance of reviewing their architecture and external dependencies.
What to expect in the next few hours
Cloudflare assures that its teams are working to “analyze and mitigate the problem” and promises frequent updates on its status page as the investigation continues. In previous incidents, the company was able to restore normality within a few hours, although the impact on reputation and customer trust often lasts longer than the outage itself.
Until a detailed post-mortem report is published, the priority for affected companies should be:
- Closely monitoring the performance of their applications.
- Keeping customers and end-users informed with clear messages about the external nature of the problem.
- Assessing whether to activate contingency plans, such as degrading certain functionalities or rerouting traffic through alternative paths if possible.
Meanwhile, this latest Cloudflare outage adds to the list of warnings that the Internet has been accumulating over recent years: the cloud is powerful, but not infallible. When a key component fails, the entire network reveals how much resilience is still a work in progress.
Frequently Asked Questions about the Cloudflare Outage
Why does Cloudflare’s failure affect so many websites and services at once?
Because Cloudflare acts as an intermediary between millions of websites and their users. It provides CDN, DDoS protection, proxy services, firewall, and serverless platform (Workers). If a critical component fails, many sites dependent on that layer become unresponsive—even if their origin servers are functioning perfectly.
Does this outage mean my data is at risk?
In previous major outages, Cloudflare attributed the problems to internal failures or traffic spikes without evidence of security breaches. So far, there are no public indications of data leakage in this incident; the impact is primarily on service availability. Still, it’s best to wait for the official report before drawing definitive conclusions.
Can the Internet be used normally during a Cloudflare outage?
Yes, but with caveats. Services that do not rely heavily on Cloudflare, or only partially do so, will continue functioning normally. Others—especially popular websites or online games depending on their network—may experience errors, timeouts, or blank pages while the outage persists.
What can companies do to minimize the impact of future outages from Cloudflare or other cloud providers?
Common strategies include designing multicloud or multi-CDN architectures, maintaining static backup copies of critical content, establishing clear communication plans with clients during external failures, and regularly reviewing dependencies and single points of failure in their online service architectures.