A second major failure in 20 days reignites concerns over the world’s dependence on a single internet infrastructure giant
A sweeping Cloudflare outage on December 5 triggered access failures across thousands of websites and online services worldwide, from AWS and Shopify to Fortnite and League of Legends — with Vietnam among the hardest-hit regions. The disruption began around 4 p.m. Hanoi time, when users suddenly encountered 500 Internal Server Error messages and widespread connection failures. IT communities quickly traced the problem to Cloudflare, one of the world’s most central internet infrastructure providers.
By 16:12, DownDetector logged nearly 2,000 Cloudflare-related complaints as major services reliant on its content-delivery and security network began to falter. Even DownDetector itself, which uses Cloudflare, experienced intermittent outages. Cloudflare has yet to formally confirm the incident, but its service-status page acknowledged an investigation into “increased error rates for customers running Worker scripts,” coinciding with scheduled maintenance at several U.S. data centers.
This marks the company’s second global failure in under three weeks. In November, Cloudflare admitted a faulty configuration update in its Bot Management system had mistakenly blocked legitimate traffic, briefly crippling access to xAI, Grok, X, Discord, OpenAI’s ChatGPT, and thousands of smaller sites. The recurrence has prompted major partners — including OpenAI — to reconsider diversifying away from Cloudflare to reduce systemic risk.
Cloudflare occupies an outsized role in the global internet: its network powers roughly 20% of global web traffic and shields millions of sites from DDoS attacks while accelerating load speeds. That scale means even minor disruptions have sweeping, immediate consequences across the digital economy.
As the investigation continues, the episode underscores a growing structural challenge: the modern internet’s heavy reliance on a small number of infrastructure providers. Each outage serves as a stress test for global resilience — and a warning that a more distributed, less fragile web may no longer be a theoretical ideal, but a practical necessity.
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Source: Vietnam Insider