It seems my moving away from major tech companies is working well, I didn't even notice there was an outage (again).
There is now a blog post from cloudflare on the outage: https://blog.cloudflare.com/5-december-2025-outage/
We just need IANA to add that new status code. /s
HTML error code?
That's an HTTP status code, I know what those are :P
When laypeople see "404" I think they generally think of something other than "status" code, but I suppose you are correct.
I think it also doesn't help that only 4XX (client error) and 5XX (server error) are defined as error status codes, and 4XX errors don't even necessarily indicate that anything happened that shouldn't happen (need to reauth, need to wait a bit, post no longer exists, etc).
Trying to think of what 6XX would stand for, and we already have "Service Unavailable" and "Bad Gateway"/"Gateway Timeout", so I guess 6XX would be "incompetence errors". 600 is "Bad Implementation", 601 is "Service Hosted On Azure", 602 is "Inference Failure" (for AI stuff), and I guess 666 is "Cloudflare Outage".
I like that the headline needs to include the date so people know this is not an article from a few weeks ago.
Stop using it already. The internet was not meant to be centralised.
On the one hand, I 110% agree with you
On the other hand, it's so damn convenient. They cache your shit and they protect you from DDoS attacks, and they do it for free*
*Until you're big enough to warrant extortion from them.
I am pretty sure that 99% of sites would have less downtime due to DDoS attacks than from such outages. I have so many issues with Cloudflare that I don't even know where to begin with, from over-caching causing issues up to decrypting all traffic, who the hell thinks this is really a good idea?
Is there a reason these outages seem to have increased recently?
Is there a reason these outages seem to have increased recently?
We've had three years of unnecessary tech layoffs.
Nobody knows how the fuck anything in their technology stack works anymore.
Everyone is just spinning the giant wheel over and over and hoping it doesn't land on bankrupt.
Sell your technology stocks, kids.
From the blog post OP linked in a comment:
We made an unrelated change that caused a similar, longer availability incident two weeks ago on November 18, 2025. In both cases, a deployment to help mitigate a security issue for our customers propagated to our entire network and led to errors for nearly all of our customer base.
It seems that the method they have of specifically propagating new security configurations to their servers is not a gradual or group-based rollout, it pushes certain changes to all servers at once, so uncaught bugs end up hitting everything instead of just some initial test group.
In particular, the projects outlined below should help contain the impact of these kinds of changes:
Enhanced Rollouts & Versioning: Similar to how we slowly deploy software with strict health validation, data used for rapid threat response and general configuration needs to have the same safety and blast mitigation features. This includes health validation and quick rollback capabilities among other things.
"Fail-Open" Error Handling: As part of the resilience effort, we are replacing the incorrectly applied hard-fail logic across all critical Cloudflare data-plane components. If a configuration file is corrupt or out-of-range (e.g., exceeding feature caps), the system will log the error and default to a known-good state or pass traffic without scoring, rather than dropping requests. Some services will likely give the customer the option to fail open or closed in certain scenarios. This will include drift-prevention capabilities to ensure this is enforced continuously.
This is the actual answer with respect to Cloudflare. Their config system was fucked in November. It's still fucked in December. React's massive CVE just forced them to use it again.
More generally, the issue is a matter of companies forcefully accelerating feature development at the cost of stability, likely due to AI. This is how the company I'm at is like anyway.
Lack of NSA funding to run their man in the middle platform that everyone likes.
Without looking into this specific outage, I'd suggest things like deferred maintenance and "cost optimizing" technical staffing are often contributing factors. (At least in my experience)
Is this an off season April Fool's joke?
TL;DR: React broke the internet.
Well, that, but also Cloudflare went down because they were trying to fix React's shit.
it's back
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