Cloudflare Restores Services After December 5, 2025 Dashboard Outage — Full Details & Impact

Cloudflare’s Brief Dashboard Outage on 5 December 2025 — Services Restored Promptly

On 5 December 2025, Cloudflare experienced a brief but impactful dashboard outage that disrupted access to several online services worldwide. The issue stemmed from an internal change to its Web Application Firewall (WAF) request‑parsing logic, deployed in response to a recently disclosed vulnerability in React Server Components. This change inadvertently caused their dashboard and related APIs to become temporarily unavailable between 08:47 GMT and 09:13 GMT.

As a result, many websites and applications relying on Cloudflare’s CDN, DNS, or security services — including major platforms like crypto exchange Coinbase and AI‑service provider Claude AI — faced temporary outages or error messages such as “500 Internal Server Error” or “Bad Gateway.”

Within a short time, Cloudflare’s engineering team identified the problem, deployed a fix, and by approximately 09:20 GMT announced that the issue had been resolved. Services, dashboard access, and APIs returned to normal operation soon after.

Despite the quick fix, the outage triggered concerns among users and investors. Cloudflare’s shares dropped by as much as 4.5% in pre‑market trading, reflecting renewed scrutiny over the risks of cloud‑infrastructure centralization.

This incident serves as a sharp reminder for website owners and developers: even a small internal configuration change at a major infrastructure provider can cascade into widespread disruption for thousands of dependent services globally. Experts suggest that businesses using cloud/CDN providers should maintain redundancy or alternative setups to mitigate risk during such single‑point failures.

In short — Cloudflare quickly restored services after the dashboard outage, but the event highlights the fragile dependence many online services have on a few cloud‑infrastructure providers. Organizations may need to re-evaluate their backup and failover strategies to ensure resilience in a volatile digital ecosystem.