For the second time in just a few months, a significant outage at internet infrastructure giant Cloudflare caused widespread disruptions across major websites and online services globally on Friday, December 5. The incident severely impacted several prominent Indian stock trading platforms during crucial market hours, leaving traders stranded.
Planned Maintenance Triggers Widespread Disruption
Cloudflare, a company that powers a critical portion of the internet's backbone, confirmed that its network was impacted while it was conducting planned maintenance work. According to the official Cloudflare System Status page, the scheduled maintenance activity commenced at 09:00 UTC on 5 December. The notice initially stated that updates would be provided as necessary, but the activity led to a broader than expected service failure.
Indian Brokerages and Global Platforms Grind to a Halt
The outage had an immediate and severe impact on major Indian financial brokerages, all of which rely on Cloudflare for their network infrastructure. Leading platforms including Zerodha, Groww, Angle One, and Upstox experienced login failures, delayed trades, and periods of complete unavailability. With services going offline during active market hours, the disruption caused significant inconvenience and potential financial impact for day traders.
In response to the crisis, Zerodha advised its users to switch to Kite WhatsApp as a backup to manage their trades. After services were restored, the brokerage posted an update stating, "Cloudflare global outage resolved. Kite services have been restored. You can now trade normally. We regret the inconvenience caused."
The disruption was not confined to finance. A wide array of global services were also affected. Popular apps and platforms such as Shopify, Zoom, and the game Valorant faced issues. Productivity and creative tools were hit hard, with design platform Canva and writing assistant QuillBot becoming inaccessible for many users.
Netizens Voice Frustration as Outage Reports Surge
Public frustration was palpable on social media as users rushed to report the problems. Industry outage tracker Downdetector recorded more than 2,100 reports related to Cloudflare by Friday afternoon, with reports flooding in starting around 1:50 pm IST. The surge in traffic was so high that Downdetector itself briefly became inaccessible.
This incident follows a similar large-scale Cloudflare disruption that occurred just last month, which temporarily brought down global platforms like X (formerly Twitter), ChatGPT, Perplexity, Spotify, and PayPal. The recurrence has sparked serious concerns about reliability and central points of failure on the modern internet.
Netizens expressed their anger online. One user on X questioned, "Is there no alternative to Cloudflare? I think their definition of making the internet safe is making the internet inaccessible." Another pointedly noted, "at this point @Cloudflare is taking down our sites more than hackers."
While services have now been restored, the repeated nature of these outages highlights the vulnerabilities inherent in an internet ecosystem heavily dependent on a few key infrastructure providers. The event underscores the need for critical services, especially in sectors like finance, to have robust, multi-vendor contingency plans in place.
