Cloudflare’s Dec 5 outage spotlights the blast radius of edge dependencies

Cloudflare experienced an outage on December 5, 2025, reminding anyone running production on the modern web that a single edge provider can become a systemic choke point. What’s notable here isn’t just downtime-it’s how quickly a control-plane or policy issue at a globally anycast network can surface as app failures, elevated error rates, or timeouts across thousands of unrelated services. Under the hood, Cloudflare sits in the hot path for DNS, TLS termination, caching, and WAF/routing decisions; a disruption in any one of those layers can look like your origin is broken when it’s not.

The bigger picture is concentration risk. Many teams treat “CDN + DNS” as de facto HA, but resilience at the edge is architectural, not automatic. Worth noting: dual-authoritative DNS with independent providers, short TTLs with guarded rollouts, origin-bypass paths for critical APIs, and fail-open policies for static assets can meaningfully shrink impact windows. Observability should separate provider vs. origin symptoms (e.g., split synthetic checks via multiple networks) and deploy circuit breakers and jittered retries to avoid self-amplification during partial outages. None of this is new, but incidents like this underline a hard truth: when your edge is a single vendor, your SLOs are, too.