Cloudflare infrastructure service encountered a problem, affecting Vietnamese users

Many incidents were recorded around 4:00 p.m. on December 5 (Hanoi time), affecting many users both in Vietnam and around the world.

“Please note, Docker and AWS are having difficulty accessing. Maybe the error is from Cloudflare,” an IT group administrator posted on social networks on the afternoon of December 5. In the comments section, many other members also shared the same situation. When accessing, some websites display a 500 Internal Server Error, indicating that there is a problem connecting to the site’s server.

On the website that monitors the status of Down Detector services, nearly 2,000 complaints about Cloudflare’s problems were recorded at a peak around 4:12 p.m. A series of services such as Crunchyroll, AWS, Shopify, or games Fortnite, League of Legends difficult to access. The Down Detector page using Cloudflare also crashed.

Cloudflare representatives have not confirmed the issue, but the platform’s status page states: “Cloudflare is investigating an increased level of errors among customers running Worker scripts.” At the same time, the company also conducts a series of periodic maintenance programs at a number of data centers in the US.

This is the second time in less than 20 days that Cloudflare has encountered an error, resulting in a series of other services being affected. According to Independentafter the incident in November, many partners, such as OpenAI, were able to use alternatives to reduce their dependence on Cloudflare, helping to avoid this incident.

Cloudflare is one of the world’s largest Internet infrastructure providers, operating content delivery networks, web firewalls and DDoS protection systems for millions of websites and applications. They are an essential platform for about 20% of global traffic, helping to protect websites from cyber attacks and optimize page loading speeds.

Previously, on the evening of November 18, users in Vietnam and many regions around the world had difficulty accessing large platforms such as xAI, Grok, X, Discord, OpenAI ChatGPT, Shopify and thousands of other small websites. Cloudflare later confirmed that the cause was a configuration error in the Bot Management module update, causing legitimate traffic to be blocked. The problem was resolved after 45 minutes, but raised questions about the role of the company and similar service providers in the global network structure.