A significant technical failure at global internet infrastructure giant Cloudflare triggered widespread disruptions across numerous popular websites and applications in India on Friday, December 5, 2025. The outage impacted critical services used by millions, including the video conferencing platform Zoom and leading Indian financial apps Zerodha Kite and Groww, leading to a surge in user complaints and connectivity issues.
Timeline and Scale of the Disruption
The service problems began at 1:50 p.m. on Friday, December 5, 2025. According to data compiled by the prominent industry outage tracker, Downdetector, the incident rapidly escalated. The platform recorded more than 2,000 user reports related to Cloudflare's services in the afternoon following the initial disruption. This spike in reports indicated a high-volume outage affecting a substantial user base.
What Services Were Affected?
The outage had a cascading effect on platforms that rely on Cloudflare's content delivery network and security services. Users across the country reported being unable to access or experiencing severe difficulties with:
- Zoom: The essential tool for remote work and meetings faced connection problems.
- Zerodha Kite: The trading platform for one of India's largest stock brokers was hit, potentially affecting live market operations for investors.
- Groww: The popular investment and mutual funds app also suffered from the server issues.
Downdetector's data analysis revealed that the majority of users filing reports were encountering problems with website access, failed server connections, and related hosting complications. This points to a core infrastructure failure at Cloudflare that prevented normal traffic flow to its client websites.
Implications and User Impact
Such a widespread outage underscores the deep dependency of the modern digital economy on a few key infrastructure providers. For Indian users, the disruption came during a regular business day, likely hampering work, communication, and financial activities. The incident highlights the vulnerability of even major tech services to single points of failure and the importance of robust, fail-safe internet architecture. While the exact cause of the December 5th outage was not detailed in the initial reports, the scale of user complaints confirms it was a significant event for the Indian online ecosystem.
