Cloudflare outage resolved after impacting Fortnite, LinkedIn, X, more

Cloudflare was temporarily down early on Friday, Dec. 5, after an intentional system change caused outages to some websites across the internet.

"A change made to how Cloudflare's Web Application Firewall parses requests impacted the availability of Cloudflare's network for several minutes today," Cloudflare's support team said in a statement before 5 a.m. EST.

The internet infrastructure platform emphasized that the outage was the result of a change made by its team — not an attack.

According to Downdetector, an outage-tracking website, reports of disruptions spiked across platforms like Fortnite, DoorDash, Chime and more around the same time as the Cloudflare incident..

This is the second Cloudflare outage in the last month. On Nov. 18, it also faced a disruption that caused widespread impacts across the internet for several hours.

USA TODAY has reached out to Cloudflare.

Is Cloudflare still down?

As of 7 a.m. EST, Cloudflare's services are widely operational in the United States, according to its status page.

Earlier, Cloudflare identified an issue and began investigating just before 4 a.m. EST on Dec. 5, according to an incident report. The platform said it was resolved by about 4:20 a.m. EST.

What caused Cloudflare outage?

Cloudflare said its team implemented a firewall change to address a security vulnerability in React Server Components — a feature in the web interface library React.

"The change was deployed by our team to help mitigate the industry-wide vulnerability disclosed this week in React Server Components," Cloudflare said.

On Dec. 3, React issued an update recommending platforms that support its Server Components feature to upgrade to a new version.

Which websites were down during Cloudflare outage?

According to Downdetector, the following websites reported increased outages around 4 a.m. EST: