A significant worldwide internet disruption has caused major websites and services, including X (formerly Twitter), Substack, and Canva, to go offline. The outage, which began on the morning of Friday, 5 December 2025, is linked to a major problem with the Cloudflare service.
Widespread Disruption Reported
According to the tracking website Down Detector, the outages are being felt globally. Thousands of users across multiple continents have reported issues accessing a host of popular online platforms.
Instead of loading normally, affected websites are displaying a "500 internet server error" warning. This type of error indicates a critical problem on the server side, preventing the sites from functioning.
Core Infrastructure Failure
The root cause appears to be a failure at Cloudflare, a critical piece of internet infrastructure used by millions of websites to improve security, performance, and reliability. When Cloudflare experiences problems, it has a cascading effect, bringing down countless other services that depend on it.
News reporter Eliana Nunes first reported on the breaking story, with updates filed from 09:29 on 5 December 2025. The incident is developing rapidly, with engineers likely working to resolve the widespread failure.
Impact on Users and Businesses
The outage has caused significant disruption for both individual users and businesses that rely on these platforms for communication, content creation, and design work. The simultaneous failure of such high-profile services underscores the interconnected nature of the modern web and the risks associated with reliance on key infrastructure providers.
While the full scale and duration of the outage are still being assessed, it serves as a stark reminder of the fragility of our digital ecosystem. Users are advised to be patient as technicians work to restore services globally.
