For almost an hour on Friday, December 5, a wave of “500 Internal Server Error” messages wreaked havoc on many online services.
Among them, Canva, Vinted, Doctolib, Deliveroo, Shopify, Fortnite, and numerous other websites were briefly paralyzed. The cause was a new malfunction at Cloudflare , just days after a previous outage in mid-November.
This situation raises very serious questions about the massive dependence of the internet on this type of infrastructure…
According to initial reports relayed in particular on the Downdetector website , the disruptions began around 10 a.m. before easing shortly after 11 a.m.
Users were met with server errors, all pointing to Cloudflare. On the social network X, Dane Knecht , CTO of Cloudflare, quickly addressed the issue in a post .
He acknowledged the problem, assuring that it was not an attack, as the company had been attacked several times with massive DDoS attacks .
The company explained that it was working to fully restore services , while emphasizing the ” frustration ” caused to users and affected businesses. A few minutes later, a large portion of the affected sites were back online.
A repetition that raises questions
Today, the American company plays a leading role in securing, managing and optimizing traffic for thousands of sites and applications, to the point of claiming to handle approximately 20% of global traffic.
This outage comes barely two weeks after a similar incident on November 18, which had already caused many sites to be unavailable for several hours.
This new episode highlights the strategic place occupied by Cloudflare in the architecture of the internet, because when the platform falters, a whole section of the web falters.
And even though Cloudflare has also been transparent on its website by going into detail about this incident , the limited access to professional, medical, social networking, or even banking applications raises real questions.
Towards an acceleration of digital sovereignty in Europe?
While websites and applications are now available again, this incident reignites the debate on the resilience of the current web and the need for many businesses and media outlets to rethink their redundancy mechanisms.
In Europe, this latest incident has reignited the debate surrounding digital sovereignty. An alliance was launched last November , but will that be enough to stand up to Cloudflare?