Cloudflare's Reliability Crisis: Two Major Outages in 30 Days Shake Developer Trust

The December 5, 2025 Outage: What Happened

Cloudflare's second major outage in a month began at 14:32 UTC and affected customers globally for approximately 45 minutes. While shorter than November's 2-hour incident, the impact was arguably worse—it struck during peak business hours for both US and European markets.

Root Cause: Control Plane Deployment Gone Wrong

According to Cloudflare's preliminary post-incident report, the outage was triggered by a routine control plane deployment that contained a subtle configuration bug. The change passed all staging tests but interacted unexpectedly with production traffic patterns.

1. Control plane update deployed to edge nodes globally
2. New config caused route calculation errors under high load
3. Edge nodes began rejecting valid origin connections
4. 522 errors (Connection Timed Out) propagated to end users
5. Monitoring detected anomaly 3 minutes into incident
6. Automated rollback failed; manual intervention required
7. Engineers manually reverted config across 300+ PoPs
                    

Context: The November 14 Outage

Three weeks earlier, on November 14, Cloudflare experienced a 2-hour outage that affected an estimated 4.2 million websites. That incident was caused by a power failure at a key data center that cascaded into routing table corruption.

The fact that two unrelated root causes produced similar global impacts within 30 days raises serious questions about Cloudflare's architectural resilience and deployment practices.

The Blast Radius: Who Was Affected

Cloudflare powers roughly 20% of all websites on the internet. When it goes down, the impact is felt across every industry.

Why Two Outages in 30 Days is Alarming

Individual outages happen—even to the most reliable providers. What makes this situation particularly concerning is the pattern it reveals.

What Developers Should Do Now

Whether you're considering alternatives or staying with Cloudflare, here are concrete steps to improve your application's resilience.

Multi-CDN Strategy Options

resource "aws_route53_health_check" "cloudflare" {
  fqdn              = "cloudflare-origin.example.com"
  port              = 443
  type              = "HTTPS"
  failure_threshold = 3
  request_interval  = 10
}

resource "aws_route53_record" "multi_cdn" {
  zone_id = aws_route53_zone.primary.zone_id
  name    = "cdn.example.com"
  type    = "A"

  # Primary: Cloudflare
  set_identifier = "cloudflare-primary"
  health_check_id = aws_route53_health_check.cloudflare.id

  weighted_routing_policy {
    weight = 100
  }

  alias {
    name    = "cloudflare.example.com"
    zone_id = var.cloudflare_zone_id
  }
}

resource "aws_route53_record" "multi_cdn_failover" {
  zone_id = aws_route53_zone.primary.zone_id
  name    = "cdn.example.com"
  type    = "A"

  # Failover: Fastly
  set_identifier = "fastly-failover"

  weighted_routing_policy {
    weight = 0  # Only used when Cloudflare fails health check
  }

  alias {
    name    = "fastly.example.com"
    zone_id = var.fastly_zone_id
  }
}
                    

Cloudflare's Response and Promises

To their credit, Cloudflare has been transparent about both incidents, publishing detailed post-mortems and committing to improvements.

However, promises are easier than execution. The real test will be Cloudflare's track record over the next 12 months. Investors have already reacted: CF stock dropped 8% in after-hours trading following the December incident.

The Bigger Picture: Internet Consolidation Risk

These outages highlight a troubling trend: the internet is becoming increasingly dependent on a small number of infrastructure providers.

When Cloudflare sneezes, 20% of the internet catches a cold. This level of concentration wasn't the original vision of a decentralized web, and it creates systemic risks that go beyond any single company's operational excellence.