A sudden major outage at Cloudflare — one of the world’s largest internet infrastructure providers — caused widespread disruption on December 5, 2025, knocking out access to dozens of major websites and services worldwide. 

Sites and platforms such as LinkedIn, Zoom, Canva, and others experienced downtime for about 25 minutes. The root cause: a coding error in Cloudflare’s Web Application Firewall (WAF) during an emergency update intended to patch a critical vulnerability in React server‑side components. 

Cloudflare’s Chief Technology Officer publicly apologized, promising improved resilience and transparency going forward — but the incident exposed what tech experts call a dangerous “single point of failure” in global internet infrastructure. 

For users in Namibia — including potential listeners of ZYLO — the outage is a warning that reliance on a few large tech providers can disrupt everything from social media, online work, education, to communications in a heartbeat. It underscores the importance of backup plans and regional infrastructure resilience. 

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