New Cloudflare outage takes some sites offline, including Trump’s Truth Social

SAN FRANCISCO – Multiple online platforms, including US President Donald Trump’s Truth Social network, were briefly down on Dec 5, with American internet services company Cloudflare acknowledging its systems were to blame.

An error message mentioning Cloudflare was displayed to people trying to visit Truth Social and other sites, such as graphic design platform Canva, until around 0930 GMT (5.30pm, Singapore time).

“We are aware of the issue impacting the availability of Cloudflare’s network,” the company’s chief technology officer Dane Knecht posted on X, adding that the cause was “not an attack”.

Many X users complained of problems connecting to other sites earlier in the day.

The glitch also caused the websites of several banks, Shopify, Zoom and LinkedIn to go down.

Cloudflare – a platform that provides services, including security and traffic management, and optimisation for websites and applications – said it has fixed the problem.

“A fix has been implemented, and we are monitoring the results,” the San Francisco-based company said on its status page.

The same page shows that there were issues with the Cloudflare dashboard and related application programming interfaces (APIs) earlier in the day.

A

major outage at Cloudflare in November

disrupted websites ranging from X to ChatGPT for several hours.

Internet usage around the world has been hobbled on several occasions due to

glitches at companies

that provide the digital infrastructure that keeps websites running, highlighting how global connectivity is dependent on relatively few players.

Websites for the Norwegian and Swedish governments were both down, with outages widespread for a number of Norwegian state entities, including the central bank, the sovereign wealth fund and the tax authority.

Cloudflare’s software is used by hundreds of thousands of companies globally, acting as a buffer between their websites and end users and working to protect their sites from attacks that might overload them with traffic.

Its widespread use is why many popular websites go down or are unreliable during Cloudflare outages. BLOOMBERG