What is Cloudflare? Why Its Outage Disrupts Groww, X, Zerodha, Perplexity, ChatGPT, Amazon, Insta Services?

Cloudflare outage caused massive disruptions across multiple platforms, including Amazon, Instagram, Zerodha, Angel One, Groww, X, Perplexity, ChatGPT, Canva, etc. Several users vented out their frustrations about not being able to use most of these platforms.

Users complained about inconvenience in using Zerodha, Instagram, Shopify, Zoom, Canva, Jio, Perplexity, Airtel, Facebook, OpenAi, X, Gemini, YouTube, Grok, and even Google Meet, according to Downdetector.com.

The issue was not directly with most of these websites. However, glitch in Cloudflare services impacted most of these platforms. Cloudflare is a company that powers a large part of the global internet. Let's understand what is Cloudflare and how its outage impacts other websites.

What is Cloudflare?

Cloudflre is one of the biggest networks operating on the internet. The company offers services and solutions to other websites to increase security and performance of their platforms.

It is an internet infrastructure company that doesn't directly deals with internet users like us. Its global network helps websites load faster, filters harmful traffic, and handles large volumes of vuisits. Many organisations rely on Cloudflare to keep sites reliable, especially during traffic spikes or while facing online attacks.

Cloudflare's role covers several core services that sit between users and website servers. These include content delivery, security filtering, traffic routing, and DNS resolution. Together, these tasks place Cloudflare at a central point in global data flows, which explains why any Cloudflare outage quickly affects many online platforms at once.

Cloudflare Outage

As per Downdetector website, there were nearly 675 complaints related to Cloudflare outage at 2:50 pm on Friday, December 5. 68% of these complaints were related to website outage, whereas 24% were related to server connection and 9% of complaints were related to hosting.

Some of the websites that use Clouflare services are Coinbase, Amazon, Perplexity, Open.AI, Groww, Zerodha, Angel One, MakeMyTrip, Perplexity, etc.

In an update on its status page, Cloudflare stated: "Cloudflare is investigating issues with Cloudflare Dashboard and related APIs. Customers using the Dashboard / Cloudflare APIs are impacted as requests might fail and/or errors may be displayed." Later, the company confirmed that "A fix has been implemented and we are monitoring the results."

What Happens During a Cloudflare Outage?

When a Cloudflare outage occurs, user requests may never reach the actual website servers. Sites can then appear offline, load very slowly, or show error codes, even though their own systems function normally. The incident highlighted how heavily the modern internet depends on a small group of infrastructure providers. A single technical issue inside one network briefly disrupted access to X, ChatGPT, and countless smaller sites.