- Cloudflare outage caused major websites and services to go offline briefly on Friday
- Affected platforms included Perplexity, Groww, Zerodha, Zoom, Shopify, and HDFC Bank
- Downdetector also experienced downtime, limiting real-time outage tracking for users
A widespread outage on Friday took down several major websites and online services across sectors, including search platforms, brokerages, newsrooms and design tools, before access gradually returned.
The disruption was traced back to issues at Cloudflare, which reported and resolved a service incident during the period.
Perplexity, Groww, Zerodha and Downdetector were among the sites that went offline. News outlets also faced downtime during the outage window.
Platforms including Zoom, Shopify, Claude, Canva, LinkedIn and HDFC Bank experienced interruptions as well, according to Downdetector.
Many users were unable to check outage patterns in real time because Downdetector itself went offline briefly before returning. Once the site was back up, it showed spikes in reports across several services.
Cloudflare said it began investigating problems affecting its dashboard and related APIs as of 2:30 pm IST. Users faced failed requests and error messages during that period. The company later said it was continuing to investigate, then confirmed that a fix had been implemented.
Cloudflare stated that it had resolved the incident at 02:50 pm IST and was monitoring the results.
Repeated Incidents
This was not the first outage involving Cloudflare. Last month, the company faced a similar disruption that mirrored the impact of an Amazon Web Services issue in October. That incident caused short interruptions for major platforms including X and ChatGPT.
Cloudflare had earlier reported problems with its content delivery network. The network links servers in different regions to speed up the loading of web pages, images and videos. A user in Mumbai, for instance, loads a page faster when it comes from a nearby edge server rather than a distant origin server.
The system also eases pressure on origin servers by spreading requests across edge servers. It adds a layer of security by handling traffic and filtering harmful activity before it reaches the main server.
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