Several websites were down on Friday 5 December, due to another outage at the internet infrastructure company Cloudflare – similar to what happened in mid-November.
On its website, Cloudflare confirmed the outage shortly before 9 am on 5 December ("customers using the Cloudflare dashboard and APIs are impacted: requests may fail and/or errors may be displayed"), before posting a message twenty minutes later indicating that everything should slowly return to normal.
This is not the first time that Cloudflare's services have gone down. On 18 November, a technical problem paralysed part of the global web and affected services such as Spotify, X (formerly Twitter), ChatGPT, and even the SNCB in Belgium.
Around 10:30 am Belgian time, the DownDetector website indicated that Cloudflare users were still experiencing some problems. Several other services, such as LinkedIn, Vinted, the Epic Games Store, Perplexity and Zoom, are also affected.
Conversely, platforms such as YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, ChatGPT, the PlayStation Network and Google and Amazon services appear to have been spared.
Cloudflare ensures the availability of nearly 20% of the global web. As a result, if Cloudflare encounters a problem, one in five websites worldwide pays the price.
