The Cloudflare outage on December 5, 2025, caused widespread disruptions across websites worldwide. It demonstrates how quickly the internet can slow down when a core connectivity provider faces issues. Reports from multiple regions confirmed that major platforms, trading services and everyday websites displayed errors or became unreachable.
The incident comes just weeks after the November 18 Cloudflare outage, which had already shown how a failure in a major CDN can affect millions of websites within minutes.
Cloudflare supports about 20% of all websites on the internet.
So, naturally, at this scale, the outage directly undermines website resilience and triggers immediate slowdowns across global traffic. Many websites struggled to load during the outage. Dashboards froze, and key online services stopped working. For small business owners, this was confusing because nothing had changed on their own website. The problem originated outside their hosting environment, making the downtime harder to understand.
This reminds us that no system is perfect. Even a major connectivity provider can experience downtime. The effects can spread across the internet within minutes. For SMBs, it highlights the need for strong website resilience and reliable hosting redundancy.
What do we know about the Cloudflare Outage on December 5th so far?
On December 5th, 2025, Cloudflare suffered a global service disruption that caused dozens of popular websites and online platforms to go down or display errors.
The outage appears to have begun around 09:00 UTC, when users began reporting widespread failures. It seems to have lasted around 12 minutes, with a fix deployed at 09:12 UTC. Cloudflare acknowledged issues on its status page tied to its “Dashboard and API” services.
However, third-party reports state that the outage was triggered by a configuration change to Cloudflare’s Web Application Firewall (WAF). The update was reportedly intended to mitigate a recently disclosed industry-wide vulnerability in React Server Components. But the change altered how the WAF parsed incoming requests. This caused parts of Cloudflare’s network to become temporarily unavailable.
These same reports also note that logging functions were temporarily disabled during the mitigation process. This may have contributed to the disruption and further complicated the early diagnosis.
Importantly, Cloudflare has indicated that the outage was not caused by a cyberattack or any malicious activity, but rather an internal configuration error with unintended consequences.
Major affected services reportedly included large-scale platforms such as LinkedIn, Zoom, Shopify and other banking, fintech and web-based services.
Cloudflare has said it implemented a fix and is now monitoring results; as of the latest update, services are now restored and Cloudflare is monitoring the results.
TLDR: Even the largest global networks can go down and when they do, everyone feels it.
Let us steer towards the reasons why website owners are affected.
Also read: How to Survive Site Downtime: Recovery Plans & Uptime Tips
Why are website owners affected?
A major outage, such as the Cloudflare service incident on November 18, disrupts the flow of online traffic for website owners. Even if a site is running normally on its own server, it can still go offline when the network that directs and protects its data experiences problems.
This leads to downtime, slow performance and errors that site owners cannot control.
Downtime creates real business challenges. Customers lose trust when a site fails to load. Users leave quickly when pages stall. Sales drop when checkout pages freeze. Search engines also notice repeated outages.
This can affect rankings and make it harder for a site to recover future visibility. For SMBs, even a brief disruption can trigger a chain reaction that harms growth.
Downtime impacts websites by:
- Lost traffic and fewer visits
- Missed sales and abandoned carts
- Data loss risks during a server failure
- Higher latency and slower loading times
- Broken user flows and failed transactions
- Reduced SEO performance, especially during repeated outages
- Pressure on support teams to handle sudden issues
- Confusion among owners who cannot see the underlying system problems
These problems happen because CDNs sit between the site and the user. They manage caching, routing, security, DDoS protection and global distribution. When this layer experiences an outage, websites switch from stable performance to sudden downtime within seconds.
This is why website resilience, hosting redundancy and active monitoring are essential for small businesses. The next step is understanding what these lessons teach us and how to prepare for the next incident.
Lessons learned: The importance of website resilience
The Cloudflare outage reminded website owners that perfection is not possible on the internet. Even the strongest systems can fail. The goal is not to avoid every problem. The goal is to build website resilience so your site can continue running or recover quickly when issues appear.
Website resilience is built on three core ideas: redundancy, failover and geographic dispersion. Redundancy adds backup systems so your site can stay online if one path fails. Failover ensures traffic moves to a healthy server or network when an outage occurs. Geographic dispersion places resources in multiple locations so a problem in one region does not affect your entire site.
What is website resilience?
Website resilience is a site’s ability to stay online, protect data and recover quickly during outages, traffic spikes, server failures or unexpected network issues. It keeps your services available and reduces downtime for your customers.
What resilience looks like in practice
- Your site continues running even if one server fails
- Traffic shifts to another location when a network path breaks
- Backups allow fast recovery after a crash
- Monitoring alerts you when problems start
- Multiple servers handle sudden spikes in traffic
- Extra security blocks attacks that could slow or break your site
These precautionary steps can help your site stay stable during outages and protect customers from interruptions. They also build long-term trust because users can rely on your site to work even when external systems, such as a CDN, experience issues.
With the right mindset and setup, site owners can stay prepared for future incidents. The next step is learning the best practices that help reduce downtime and improve recovery during outages.
Best practices to stay protected when outages happen
A strong plan helps your site stay online during outages and recover quickly after an incident. These best practices improve website resilience and protect your customers from downtime, slow performance and network failures.
1. Use reliable hosting with built-in redundancy
Reliable hosting is the foundation of minimal downtime and strong recovery. At Bluehost, our Web Hosting solution provides a resilient network that keeps your site running even when systems are under pressure or experience unexpected failures.
Global data centers for faster, more reliable delivery: Bluehost operates performance-optimized data centers in more than 11 countries. This geographic redundancy reduces latency and ensures your site loads quickly for users in different locations. If one region experiences an outage, traffic can be rerouted to another site to maintain access.
Built-in failover systems that keep you online: Bluehost infrastructure uses automatic failover. If a server or node faces a problem, your workload moves to a healthy system without interruption. This protects your site from crashes, network errors and sudden server failures.
Redundant power and network protection: Backup power through UPS units and on-site generators keeps your site running during power issues. Redundant network paths ensure your data continues to move even if one connection breaks. These layers reduce risk and support stable performance.
Continuous backups for added peace of mind: Bluehost performs routine server-level backups and maintains snapshot capabilities. If an incident leads to data loss, you have reliable recovery options that shorten your downtime and protect your progress.
Monitored 24/7 by infrastructure experts: Bluehost engineers monitor systems around the clock. They act quickly when issues appear, manage performance and help prevent long outages.
2. Implement regular backups
Regular backups protect your data and make recovery easier. Automatic daily backups help you restore your site quickly after a failure, speed issue or outage. At Bluehost, CodeGuard protects your website with reliable daily backups, versioning and fast one-click restores. This gives you an extra layer of website resilience and keeps your recovery process simple.
Backup checklist:
- Turn on automatic daily backups with CodeGuard
- Store multiple backup versions
- Keep database and file backups separate
- Test your restoration process
- Use snapshot tools for quick recovery
- Confirm backups are running without errors
This simple plan protects your site from data loss and makes it easier to return online after an incident.
Also read: How Do I Set Up CodeGuard?
3. Enable security and performance features
Security and performance tools help your site handle attacks, heavy traffic and unexpected problems.
Key features to enable:
- Web Application Firewall to block threats and attacks
- Caching to improve speed and reduce server load
- Malware protection to keep data safe
- Free Cloudflare CDN to improve global delivery and reduce latency
These tools strengthen your site and help prevent failures during high-traffic events.
4. Monitor website health
Monitoring WordPress site health checks helps you spot problems early. Real-time alerts give you time to respond before an outage spreads.
Bluehost supports Jetpack Site Monitoring, which tracks uptime and alerts you the moment your site goes offline. This helps you act quickly and protect your users from prolonged downtime.
5. Have a response plan
A simple response plan helps you act quickly during an outage. It gives your team clear steps to manage the situation and reduces confusion for customers.
What to include in your website recovery plan:
- Contact list for your hosting provider
- Steps to check server status and CDN updates
- Clear internal communication steps
- Customer-facing messages for downtime notices
- Backup access instructions
- A checklist for restoring the site
- A review process to prevent repeat issues
A clear plan protects your business and helps you handle outages with confidence.
Why does choosing a trusted hosting partner matter?
Outages remind us that strong hosting is essential for website resilience. A trusted hosting partner provides the stability, redundancy and support needed to keep you online during unexpected incidents. When a CDN outage, network failure or system issue occurs, your hosting provider becomes the first line of protection.
Reliable hosting reduces downtime, protects your data and helps you recover quickly after an event. It also gives you confidence that experts are monitoring your servers, systems and traffic at all times. This level of support is important for small business owners who want a safe and stable place to run their site.
A trusted partner should provide:
- Geographic redundancy across multiple data centers
- Built-in failover systems that switch your site to a healthy server
- Strong network protection and backup power
- Active monitoring with fast response times
- Clear communication during outages
- Guidance that helps you manage recovery
- Tools that improve speed, security and scalability
Bluehost is built to meet these needs. Our infrastructure is designed to protect your site from downtime and help you handle unexpected challenges. At Bluehost, we guarantee 99.99% uptime. Furthermore, our support team is available around the clock to resolve issues and keep your site running smoothly.
Choosing the right hosting partner makes a real difference. It strengthens your resilience, protects your data and helps your site perform well even when the broader internet experiences problems.
Moving forward: The internet isn’t perfect, but you can be prepared
Outages will continue to happen because the internet depends on many systems working together. Any one of them can fail. This is why website resilience matters. A solid plan reduces downtime, protects your data and keeps your customers connected when external services experience issues.
The goal is not to avoid every outage. The goal is to stay ready. With the right hosting partner, your site can recover quickly and continue serving users with minimal disruption.
The Cloudflare outage made this clear. Stability depends on the strength of the foundation behind your site. At Bluehost, our resilient hosting infrastructure is built for these real challenges. It gives small businesses the backup, monitoring and failover support they need when the wider internet slows down or stops.
Write A Comment