Cloudflare Glitch Shuts Down Banks, Zoom, LinkedIn

Banking websites, Norway’s central bank, and global platforms including Zoom, Shopify, and LinkedIn were hit by a widespread outage on Friday, marking the second major disruption at network and security services provider Cloudflare in less than a month.

The outage temporarily knocked critical services offline before Cloudflare restored functionality. Customers in the UK also reported difficulties with contactless payments at some retailers, underscoring the ripple effects of the disruption across financial and consumer services.

This latest incident follows a larger outage just three weeks earlier, when Cloudflare issues caused swathes of the internet to go dark. That event impacted high-profile platforms such as ChatGPT and X (formerly Twitter), leaving millions of users unable to access services for several hours.

The recurrence of outages highlights growing concerns about the resilience of internet infrastructure providers. Cloudflare plays a central role in securing and optimizing traffic for thousands of organizations worldwide, meaning disruptions can cascade quickly across industries.

Friday’s problems also come on the heels of separate outages at Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform just a month ago. Those failures left banking services and other critical sites offline, raising questions about the vulnerability of digital ecosystems that rely heavily on a handful of providers.

Industry analysts warn that repeated outages at major infrastructure firms could erode trust in digital services, particularly in sectors like banking where reliability and security are paramount. Regulators in Europe and elsewhere are expected to scrutinize the incidents as part of broader efforts to strengthen resilience in financial and technology systems.

For businesses and consumers alike, the disruptions serve as a reminder of the fragility of the internet’s backbone — and the urgent need for contingency planning as reliance on cloud and network services deepens.