Cloudflare Down Again: The December 5 Outage and a Real-Life DownDetector Inception

Déjà Vu in the Cloud: December 5, Offline (Again)

We had barely recovered from the massive November 18 outage when, on December 5, 2025, Cloudflare reminded us once again how much the internet depends on it. This incident was smaller in scale, but users around the world still felt the effects of the infrastructure "hiccup."

The list of affected services reads like a who's who of the digital world. Users reported availability problems, login failures and "500 Internal Server Error" messages on major platforms, including:

• Zoom (right in the middle of important calls),
• LinkedIn (recruiters had to take a coffee break),
• Fortnite (which probably sparked a small teenage rebellion),
• Canva and a number of cryptocurrency platforms.

Cloudflare officially classified the incident as a "minor outage" affecting its dashboard and some integrations. The issue was fixed within a few hours, and system status returned to normal. So if something still isn't working for you, this time it's probably your provider's fault, not a global router conspiracy.

Technical analysis: Cloudflare explains the cause of the outage: a detailed breakdown of the Lua bug in a legacy proxy that triggered a global shutdown while a React vulnerability was being patched.

Inception: This Is Not a Joke

The most interesting part of these outages is what happens to DownDetector. It's where we all rush to check whether "it's just me." But when problems hit on this scale, even DownDetector can run out of breath.

This is where things get meta. It sounds like a joke, but it isn't. If you've ever wondered, "What if DownDetector goes down?", the answer already exists: DownDetectorDownDetector. Yes, you read that right. It's a fully functional website that checks whether the outage-checking website is having an outage.
And if you can't reach DownDetectorDownDetector, you can check its status at DownDetectorDownDetectorDownDetector.com.

We live in an age where the internet needs monitoring of its monitoring. Now we're waiting for DownDetectorDownDetectorDownDetectorDownDetector, because in 2025, anything is possible.

Source: Cloudflare Status

Aleksander