Cloudflare’s name has been everywhere lately, and not for reasons any internet user wants. Earlier in the year, a series of smaller but still disruptive failures affected services like DNS, Workers, and access tools, offering a warning that something was off.

Then came two far bigger breakdowns, only weeks apart. The first hit on November 18, followed by another on December 5, shaking confidence in one of the internet’s most critical backbone companies. When Cloudflare stumbles, the impact spreads quickly.

Millions of websites slipped out of reach. Gaming services lagged or refused to load. Even simple browsing turned into a mess of error messages. It left many people asking how a single company could interrupt so much of everyday online life in a matter of minutes.

Key Takeaways

Cloudflare’s back-to-back outages in November and December of 2025 caused significant disruptions across the internet, particularly affecting gaming services.

• The first outage was caused by an oversized configuration file that crashed a core part of Cloudflare’s software, impacting millions of websites.
• The second outage occurred during an update rollout, triggering a hidden bug that caused 28% of Cloudflare’s traffic to fail, significantly affecting gamers.
• Cloudflare’s outages highlight the critical role the company plays in internet infrastructure and the widespread impact of even minor failures.

Cloudflare’s November slip

Anyone following the November outage probably remembers how suddenly it all unfolded. The disruption spread through streaming apps, banking portals, shopping sites, social networks and several gaming platforms. Cloudflare later explained to CNN that the problem came from a configuration file used to manage threat traffic that had grown far beyond its expected size.

The oversized file crashed a core part of Cloudflare’s software, which meant entire chunks of the internet lost the ability to respond to normal requests. Cloudflare insisted there was no cyberattack, just a cascading technical failure inside a system that usually absorbs billions of requests without blinking.

The December failure that felt worse

Most people shrugged it off as a rare blip until the second outage arrived. On December 5, Cloudflare’s network began misbehaving again. According to the company’s own report, engineers were rolling out updates to help protect websites using React after a new industry wide vulnerability was disclosed.

During that rollout, Cloudflare increased the buffer size of its Web Application Firewall, then turned off an internal testing tool that could not handle the larger data load. Turning off the tool triggered a long hidden bug in the older FL1 proxy.

That bug caused Cloudflare’s rules engine to hit a nil value error, which pushed a wave of 500 responses across roughly 28% of its traffic. The mistake lasted only twenty five minutes, but for anyone trying to access a site that relied on that older proxy, everything simply stopped working.

Gamers felt those minutes far more than most. The modern gaming world revolves around constant server communication, persistent logins, cross platform updates and cloud based verification. When Cloudflare falters, games stop connecting, matchmaking freezes or stores refuse to load. A player who pays for cheap Minecraft servers from G Portal might wonder why their world suddenly hangs.

Why good servers still feel broken

Often, the host is not the issue at all. If Cloudflare is in the traffic path, even the most reliable server begins behaving like it is underwater. That can turn a quick gaming session into a frustrating guessing game. Is it the player’s internet. The game’s servers. Cloudflare again. No one enjoys troubleshooting before they even get to swing a sword.

People are asking whether outages really are happening more often or if we simply notice them more. Cloudflare handles over 80 million HTTP requests per second. A tiny malfunction in a huge system produces a loud impact, which is why these back to back failures feel so dramatic.

The company says it is rebuilding its rollout safeguards and locking down changes until stronger protections are in place. That work cannot come soon enough for gamers who depend on stable global infrastructure. The internet feels wonderfully big until one company hiccups and suddenly half the digital world trembles.