Cloudflare Outrage Hits Major Global Platforms

A brief global outage at Cloudflare on Friday led to widespread disruptions across multiple websites and online platforms, with users reporting access issues on major services including Zerodha, Groww, Canva, Zoom, Shopify, Valorant, LinkedIn and Down Detector.

The incident affected websites worldwide, including Indian trading platforms Zerodha and Groww, both of which later confirmed that services had been restored.

Cloudflare, a key internet infrastructure provider supporting millions of websites, experienced a disruption that briefly impacted platforms dependent on its network.

The company said it had “implemented a fix” and was investigating the cause of the outage.

Groww, Zerodha confirm disruptions, restoration

Online investment platform Groww informed users shortly after the outage began, writing, “We are currently experiencing technical issues due to a global outage at Cloudflare. This is impacting multiple apps and services worldwide. We are monitoring the situation closely and will update you the moment services are restored. Thank you for your patience.”

Minutes later, it added, “Our services have been restored. Thank you for your patience.”

Zerodha also notified its users, stating, “Due to a cross-platform downtime on Cloudflare, Kite is currently unavailable. Please use the Kite WhatsApp backup to manage your trades while we investigate.”

The platform later confirmed a resolution, posting, “Update: Cloudflare global outage resolved. Kite services have been restored. You can now trade normally. We regret the inconvenience caused.”

Why the outage had global impact

Cloudflare operates one of the largest networks on the internet, acting as a protective and performance-enhancing layer between users and website servers.

The company works with hundreds of thousands of customers across 125 countries, generating nearly $500 million in quarterly revenue.

Because of its extensive reach, technical disruptions at Cloudflare can cause widespread service outages, even when individual websites have no server issues of their own.

Recent history of disruptions

This marks the second major disruption involving Cloudflare in under three weeks.

In November, a similar outage caused platforms such as ChatGPT and Spotify to go down temporarily.

Addressing that incident, CEO Matthew Prince clarified that “The issue was not caused, directly or indirectly, by a cyber attack or malicious activity of any kind,” attributing the failure to a database configuration change.

Cloudflare has not yet disclosed the cause of Friday’s outage but confirmed that systems have been stabilised.