NAIROBI, Kenya – A major Cloudflare disruption on Friday morning sent shockwaves across the internet, temporarily knocking out dozens of popular apps and services relied on by millions of users worldwide.
Two-Hour Outage Hits Canva, LinkedIn, Taxi Apps
The outage began at around 10 am, lasting nearly two hours, and caused widespread connectivity problems across platforms that depend on Cloudflare’s web infrastructure.
Among the affected were Canva, LinkedIn, outage-tracking site Downdetector, and several digital taxi apps — leaving both creatives and commuters stuck.
Cloudflare later confirmed that scheduled maintenance was underway at the time and urged users to remain patient as engineers worked to stabilise the system.
Cloudflare Investigates API Glitches
Shortly after the disruptions, the company revealed it was probing problems with its dashboard and APIs.
“Cloudflare is investigating reports of a large number of empty pages when using the list API on a Workers KV namespace. We are working to analyse and mitigate this problem,”
the firm said in a brief statement.
Cloudflare powers critical layers of internet infrastructure, from defending websites against cyberattacks to keeping platforms stable during heavy traffic surges.
Any glitch on its network therefore ripples across the world almost instantly.
Within about an hour of the global disruption, Cloudflare said it had fixed the connectivity issues, although the earlier slowdown had already sparked frustration online.
Second Major Outage in Less Than Three Weeks
Friday’s disruption comes just weeks after another Cloudflare outage on November 18, when major platforms — including X, Canva, Grindr and ChatGPT — went dark for thousands of users globally.
During that incident, Cloudflare reported a sudden spike in unusual traffic beginning at 2:20 pm, which triggered widespread errors.
“We do not yet know the cause of the spike in unusual traffic. We are all hands on deck to make sure all traffic is served without errors,”
the company said at the time.
With two major outages occurring so close together, questions are emerging about the stability of global web infrastructure — and just how dependent the modern internet has become on a handful of backbone providers.
