Zerodha, Grove, Instagram and LinkedIn affected by global glitch – services back online – Obnews

San Francisco-based internet infrastructure giant Cloudflare suffered a small but massive outage at around 8:47 UTC on December 5, 2025, which lasted for about 25 minutes. The outage was the second in less than a month following the major incident on November 18, which caused 500 internal server errors on millions of dependent sites and apps, impacting about 20% of web traffic worldwide. According to Cloudflare’s postmortem report, this was not an attack, but a mistake in a change to the web application firewall (WAF) configuration to reduce the vulnerability of React Server components. Shares fell 4.5% in the pre-market, but recovered to -2%.

Affected services: a series of downtime
Users around the world reported issues accessing Instagram, LinkedIn, Zoom, Canva, Shopify Store, Crunchyroll, Fortnite, Valorant, Perplexity, Cloud AI, Coinbase, and HSBC on X. In India, trading apps Zerodha (Kite platform) and Grove faced glitches during peak hours, leaving investors stranded amid volatile markets. Zerodha confirmed a full restoration, while Grove also talked about a similar solution. Even the outage tracker DownDetector ironically glitched, reaching 2,000 reports before being fixed at 9:12 UTC.

Cloudflare’s status page noted dashboard and API checks, with a quick rollback resolving the main network issues. The firm said, “We apologize for this impact,” and promised to provide further details in a blog. This is similar to the bot management bug of November, which raises questions of reliability amid its “unacceptable” scale. Experts such as UCL’s Steven Murdoch urge a diverse infrastructure, pointing to potential systemic problems.

What is Cloudflare?
Founded in 2009 by Matthew Prince, Lee Holloway, and Michelle Zaitlin, Cloudflare, Inc. (NYSE: NET) is a cybersecurity and performance powerhouse headquartered in San Francisco. It acts as an invisible “middle layer” between users and servers, routing about 20% of web traffic through its edge network in more than 330 cities around the world. Serving 162,000+ paid customers (Q4 2022 data, growth continuing since), it gives sites ranging from startups to large companies like X and OpenAI seamless, secure access – protecting against threats and minimizing latency. According to W3Techs (January 2025), the free tier attracts 19.3% of sites for basic DNS/security.

Core Services: Powering the Modern Web
– **Content Delivery Network (CDN):** Caches data globally for lightning-fast loading, reducing stress on servers.
– **DDoS Mitigation:** Blocks attacks through “Project Galileo” (free for activists/journalists) and “Athenian Project” (polls).
– **Web Application Firewall (WAF):** Filters bad traffic, blocks bots/hacks; The “Firewall for AI” of 2025 protects LLMs.
– **DNS Resolution:** The free 1.1.1.1 resolver hides browsing from ISPs; .gov partnership through 2023.
– **Zero Trust Security:** Edge gateway for remote access; Integrates with Oracle/IBM for AI workloads.
– **Developer Tools:** Workers platform for serverless apps; Acquisitions like Replicate boost AI/ML deployment in 2025.

As outages highlight single-point risks, Cloudflare’s innovations – like Ephemeral IDs and AI Labyrinth (anti-scraping) – keep it essential. All services have been restored; Check status.cloudflare.com for updates.