Technical problems at internet infrastructure provider Cloudflare today have taken a host of websites offline this morning.Cloudflare said shortly after 9am UK time that it “is investigating issues with Cloudflare Dashboard and related APIs [application programming interfaces – used when apps exchange data with each other].Cloudflare has also reported it has implemented a potential fix to the issue and is monitoring the results.But the outage has affected a number of websites and platforms, with reports of problems accessing LinkedIn, X, Canva – and even the DownDetector site used to monitor online service issues.Last month, an outage at Cloudflare made many websites inaccessible for about three hours.

Time to wrap up.Global cloud services and cybersecurity firm Cloudflare has admitted it ‘let the internet down’ after a new outage hit the web today.A host of websites including LinkedIn, Zoom and Downdetector went offline on Friday morning after fresh problems at Cloudflare – the company’s second outage in less than a month.Cloudflare has blamed the outage on changes being made to its systems as it tried to detect and mitigate an industry-wide security vulnerability.Chief technical officer Dane Knecht said:Any outage of our systems is unacceptable, and we know we have let the Internet down again following the incident on November 18.

We will be publishing details next week about the work we are doing to stop these types of incidents from occurring.IT experts said the outage showed the dangers of relying on a small number of cloud infrastructures across the world.In other news…A separate IT problem with air traffic control forced flights at Edinburgh airport to be suspended this morning.Netflix has agreed to buy Warner Bros Discovery in an $82.7bn (£62bn) deal that will dramatically reshape the established Hollywood film and TV industry.

Tesla has launched the lower-priced version of its Model 3 car in Europe in a push to revive sales after a backlash against Elon Musk’s work with Donald Trump and weakening demand for electric vehicles.Elon Musk’s social media platform, X, has been fined €120m (£105m) after it was found in breach of new EU digital laws.Buyers attempting to get on to the property ladder in the UK have received a lift, after figures from Halifax showed they are in the best position to snap up a home in a decade.Back in the markets, the UK’s blue-chpi share index has ended the day down almost 0.5%.

The FTSE 100 share index has closed down 9667 points at 9667 points tonight,Engineering group Smiths (-3,5%) were the top faller, after agreeing to sell its security screening division, Smiths Detection, to funds advised by CVC Capital Partners for £2bn,They were followed by Metlen Energy (-2,7%) and oil giant BP (-2.

6%),A remorseful-sounding Cloudflare has also pledged to publish a detailed breakdown of all the resiliency projects underway,CTO Dane Knecht writes:While that work is underway, we are locking down all changes to our network in order to ensure we have better mitigation and rollback systems before we begin again,These kinds of incidents, and how closely they are clustered together, are not acceptable for a network like ours,On behalf of the team at Cloudflare we want to apologize for the impact and pain this has caused again to our customers and the Internet as a whole.

Cloudflare has admitted that it “let the internet down again” after today’s outage.In a blogpost explaining what went wrong today, Cloudflare says a coding error to its Web Application Firewall (WAF) occured as it tried to protect users against a critical vulnerability.This error led to disruption to some Cloudflare customers, depending on their network configuration.Cloudflare explains that this is “a straightforward error in the code, which had existed undetected for many years,”.Chief technical officer Dane Knecht explains:On December 5, 2025, at 08:47 UTC, a portion of Cloudflare’s network began experiencing significant failures.

The incident was resolved at 09:12 (~25 minutes total impact), when all services were fully restored.A subset of customers were impacted, accounting for approximately 28% of all HTTP traffic served by Cloudflare.Several factors needed to combine for an individual customer to be affected as described below.The issue was not caused, directly or indirectly, by a cyber attack on Cloudflare’s systems or malicious activity of any kind.Instead, it was triggered by changes being made to our body parsing logic while attempting to detect and mitigate an industry-wide vulnerability disclosed this week in React Server Components.

Any outage of our systems is unacceptable, and we know we have let the Internet down again following the incident on November 18.We will be publishing details next week about the work we are doing to stop these types of incidents from occurring.Knecht adds that this is unrelated to the change that caused a similar, longer availability incident 18 November:In both cases, a deployment to help mitigate a security issue for our customers propagated to our entire network and led to errors for nearly all of our customer base.New economic data from the US has bolstered hopes of cuts to interest rates as soon as next week.The core personal consumption expenditures price index, the Federal Reserve’s preferred inflation mesure, rose by 2.

8% per year in September, 0.1 percentage point lower than expected.New official data alsos shows Americans reined in their purchases in September; spending rose 0.3% month-on-month, but was flat after accounting for inflation.Elsewhere in the tech world, Elon Musk’s social media platform, X, has been fined €120m for breaching EU digital laws, triggering clash between the EU and Donald Trump’s administration.

X was fined for breaching EU online content rules, including through the deceptive design of its blue checkmark for verified accounts, the lack of transparency of its advertising repository and its failure to provide researchers access to public data.President Donald Trump’s envoy to the European Union accused the bloc of unfairly targeting American tech giantsAndrew Puzder, the US ambassador to the EU, told Bloomberg TV:“The only substantial meaningful fines that have been imposed so far have been against American companies.”Vice-president JD Vance also objected.Before the fine was announced, he posted on X:Rumors swirling that the EU commission will fine X hundreds of millions of dollars for not engaging in censorship.The EU should be supporting free speech not attacking American companies over garbage.

Rumors swirling that the EU commission will fine X hundreds of millions of dollars for not engaging in censorship.The EU should be supporting free speech not attacking American companies over garbage.In the City, the pound is trading near the six-week high reached yesterday.A stronger-than-expected survey of UK purchasing managers on Wednesday, and relief that the budget has finally been delivered, have helped the pound.It’s up a third of a cent today at $1.

3350.Matthew Ryan, head of market strategy at global financial services firm Ebury, explains:The upward revision to the November PMI figures has raised hopes that Britain’s economy is not slowing by quite the extent that market participants had feared, albeit with the caveat that we’re still looking at relatively muted levels of growth, way below where policymakers would hope that we’d be.“Yet, with the economy continuing to trundle along, and with the uncertainty surrounding the budget now largely in the rear view mirror, sterling has found some welcome breathing room.Focus will quickly shift to the December meeting of the Bank of England, with another 25 basis point cut already almost entirely baked in by markets.Focus surrounding the decision will instead be on where the bank sees rates going in 2026.

”Cloudflare’s outage shows the need for multi-region architecture to protect global services, argues Professor Feng Li, Associate Dean for Research & Innovation at Bayes Business School.“The Cloudflare outage is yet another reminder of how dependent major systems are on just a few cloud infrastructures across the world.“This latest episode, coupled with October’s AWS outage and the disruption that caused, should serve as yet another wake-up call for cloud providers to strengthen regional isolation, ensure critical control planes can fail safely, and maintain communicational transparency with users during such incidents.This last point is critical because confidence in the provider often depends as much on timely, clear updates as on the speed of recovery itself.“For far too long now, people have used cloud services as a single point of reliability rather than accepting shared responsibility.

With such dire consequences globally, multi-region or multi-cloud architecture must be implemented as a rapid failover.Incident response and customer communication plans should assume provider outages are a matter of when and not if.“Cloudflare will inevitably be the subject of user frustration and business disruption.However, the longer-term erosion of confidence in cloud infrastructure and the broader digital ecosystem is far bigger problem.“This latest outage continues to beg the question of what happens when a digital infrastructure collapse in one part of the world can have such globally significant consequences? It is a question that regulators, enterprises, and researchers alike need to confront.

”Big news in the world of media: Netflix has agreed to buy Warner Bros Discovery’s TV and film studios and streaming division for $72bn,The deal, worth $82,7bn once debt is included, means Netflix have beaten Paramount Skydance and Comcast to take control of one of Hollywood’s most prized and oldest assets, a move that will change the established film and TV landscape,Announcing the deal, the two companies say:This acquisition brings together two pioneering entertainment businesses, combining Netflix’s innovation, global reach and best-in-class streaming service with Warner Bros,’ century-long legacy of world-class storytelling.

Beloved franchises, shows and movies such as The Big Bang Theory, The Sopranos, Game of Thrones, The Wizard of Oz and the DC Universe will join Netflix’s extensive portfolio including Wednesday, Money Heist, Bridgerton, Adolescence and Extraction, creating an extraordinary entertainment offering for audiences worldwide,Here’s our news story on today’s Cloudflare outage:Canva, the online graphic design tool, says its services have “fully recovered following the Cloudflare outage”,All systems are now operational, Canva reports, after being taken down by the Cloudflare outage,Jake Moore, global cybersecurity adviser at ESET, has summed up the problem:“If a major provider like Cloudflare goes down for any reason, thousands of websites instantly become unreachable,“The problems often lie with the fact we are using an old network to direct internet users around the world to websites but it simply highlights there is one huge single point of failure in this legacy design.

”The Metro newspaper reports that shopping sites wer affected by the Cloudflare IT problems too – such as Shopify, Etsy, Wayfair, and H&M.H&M’s website is slow to load right now, but the other three seem to be working…Today’s Cloudflare outage is likely to intensify concerns that internet users are relying on too few technology providers.Tim Wright, technology partner at Fladgate, explains:“Cloudflare’s latest outage is another reminder that much of the internet runs through just a few hands.Businesses betting on “always-on” cloud resilience are discovering its single points of failure.Repeated disruptions will draw tougher scrutiny from regulators given DORA, NIS2, and the UK’s emerging operational resilience regimes.

Dependence on a small set of intermediaries may be efficient but poses a structural risk the digital economy cannot ignore.We can expect regulators to probe the concentration of critical functions in the cloud and edge layers — while businesses rethink whether convenience has quietly outpaced control.”Cloudflare’s System Status page shows that the problem that knocked many websites offline has been resolved.Cloudflare insists the problem was not a cyber attack; instead, it appears to have been caused by a deliberate change made by its firewall handles data requests, to fix a security vulnerability.Cloudflare says:This incident has been resolved.

A change made to how Cloudflare’s Web Application Firewall parses requests caused Cloudflare’s network to be unavailable for several minutes this morning.This was not an attack; the change was deployed by our team to help mitigate the industry-wide vulnerability disclosed this week in React Server Components.We will share more information as we have it today.An IT issue affecting air traffic control has forced Edinburgh Airport to halt all flights today.Edinburgh Airport said in a statement:“No flights are currently operating from Edinburgh Airport.

“Teams are working on the issue and will resolve as soon as possible.”pic.twitter.com/lTSCJyTVieThe Airport’s departure page is showing eight flights delayed and five cancelled, but passengers for many other flights are being told to go to the gate.Reports of problems at Cloudflare peaked at just after 9am UK time:Online video conferencing service Zoom, and Transport for London’s website (used for travel information in the capital), are among the sites hit by the Cloudflare outage.