Global Internet Stumble: Cloudflare Outage Briefly Takes Down Truth Social, Canva, and Thousands of Sites

 

San Francisco – December 6, 2025 – A widespread internet disruption on Friday morning briefly knocked offline major platforms including President Donald Trump’s Truth Social, popular design tool Canva, and even the outage-monitoring service Downdetector itself, in the latest reminder of how dependent the modern web has become on a small handful of infrastructure providers.

The outage began around 8:47 UTC (3:47 a.m. Eastern Time) and lasted approximately 25–30 minutes. Users trying to access affected sites were met with generic Cloudflare error pages, most commonly “Error 1016: Origin DNS error” or “Error 503: Service Unavailable,” along with a unique Cloudflare Ray ID. Reports flooded in from North America, Europe, Australia, and the Middle East almost simultaneously.

Cloudflare, the San Francisco-based company that provides security, performance, and traffic-routing services to roughly one-fifth of all websites worldwide, quickly acknowledged the problem. At 9:20 UTC, Chief Technology Officer Dane Knecht posted on X: “We are aware of the issue impacting the availability of Cloudflare’s network… This was not an attack.” Within minutes, the company’s status page confirmed degraded performance across its dashboard, API, and core CDN services.

By 9:30 UTC most services were recovering, and full functionality returned shortly afterward. Canva posted on X at 9:11 UTC that “all systems are now operational,” while Truth Social and other affected platforms came back online without further official statements.

According to Cloudflare’s post-incident report released later Friday, the disruption was caused by a regression introduced during an emergency patch to its Web Application Firewall (WAF) and Bot Management system. Engineers had rushed the update earlier that morning to block active exploitation of a newly disclosed critical vulnerability nicknamed “React2Shell.” Unfortunately, the fix contained a long-dormant bug in the bot-detection feature file that triggered cascading failures across the network when it was deployed globally.

This marks the second significant Cloudflare-related outage in less than three weeks. On November 18, a separate configuration error in the same Bot Management component took major sites offline for more than two hours, affecting Spotify, Discord, ChatGPT, and once again Truth Social.

1. The ripple effects on Friday were immediate and far-reaching:
2. Graphic designers and marketing teams relying on Canva lost access mid-project, with many taking to X and Reddit to vent frustration.
3. Crypto traders reported brief interruptions on centralized exchanges and DeFi front-ends.
4. Government websites in Norway and Sweden went dark, temporarily halting public services.
5. Corporate users of Zoom, Shopify, and LinkedIn experienced intermittent connectivity issues during peak morning hours in Europe and early business hours in the U.S.

Truth Social’s brief disappearance drew particular attention online, with some users jokingly speculating about “deep-state sabotage” despite Cloudflare’s explicit statement that the incident was not malicious. The platform, which has grown to more than 10 million monthly active users since its 2022 launch, has become a central hub for Trump supporters and conservative commentary during his second presidency.

Industry watchers noted the irony in Downdetector itself becoming unreachable at the exact moment thousands were trying to confirm whether their favorite sites were down. The outage-tracking service later showed massive spikes in reports for Cloudflare-dependent platforms between 8:50 and 9:20 UTC.

Cloudflare emphasized that customer data remained secure throughout the incident and that no evidence of exploitation occurred. The company promised a deeper review of its emergency-release process and additional safeguards to prevent similar regressions from reaching production.

The event underscores a growing concern among technologists: as more of the internet consolidates behind a few dominant CDN and security providers — Cloudflare, Fastly, Akamai, and Amazon CloudFront chief among them — even brief, non-malicious failures can produce global shockwaves. Cybersecurity experts renewed calls for organizations to diversify their infrastructure stacks and maintain robust offline fallbacks.

For everyday users, Friday’s disruption was little more than a minor inconvenience — a momentary inability to post a meme or finish a presentation. But it served as another wake-up call about the hidden fragility of the always-on digital world most now take for granted.