A brief outage at Cloudflare disrupted popular sites including Zoom, Canva, Fortnite, and LinkedIn on Friday, raising fresh concerns about the fragility of global internet infrastructure. The interruption came only weeks after another significant incident involving the same provider, heightening tension across the digital sector.
The disruption lasted less than an hour, yet it affected millions of users who rely on these platforms for work, communication, and entertainment. Reports collected by Downdetector showed widespread issues across major services such as League of Legends and Anthropic’s Claude chatbot, highlighting the scale of the impact felt across the web.
Cloudflare acknowledged the problem on Friday morning, stating it was dealing with internal service degradation. Users reported empty pages and error messages when trying to access various sites, with the company confirming problems linked to its Workers platform. Engineers said they were analysing the fault and working to restore normal service as quickly as possible.
The incident followed a similar episode in October, when technical issues at Amazon Web Services disrupted connections for companies relying on its data systems in the United States. That outage spread internationally, demonstrating how dependent the internet has become on a small group of technology giants.
Experts warn that reliance on a handful of major content delivery networks creates concentrated risk across the digital landscape. These networks improve reliability and reduce delays, yet they also act as potential single points of failure. Ryan Polk from the Internet Society said that when too much traffic flows through only a few providers, any fault can interrupt access for vast sections of the online world.
Friday’s outage serves as another reminder of the growing challenge of keeping the internet resilient as global dependence continues to increase.
