Why is my only allowing me to half of responses
Executive summary
You’re seeing only "half" of responses because a widespread Cloudflare outage on December 5, 2025 degraded or blocked delivery for a large portion of traffic — Cloudflare reported errors beginning at 08:47 UTC and the incident affected about 28% of its traffic, lasting roughly 25–30 minutes before a fix was deployed [1] [2]. Multiple outlets report the root cause was an internal configuration change made to mitigate a disclosed React Server Components vulnerability (CVE-2025-55182) that unintentionally disrupted services [1] [3].
1. Outage in plain terms: a traffic bottleneck that drops parts of pages
Cloudflare’s systems are a common on‑ramp for websites; when a portion of that network fails, some requests succeed while others time out or return errors, which can look like “only half” of a page or replies arriving and the rest missing. Cloudflare acknowledged significant failures beginning at 08:47 UTC on Dec. 5 and describes the incident as not an attack but a configuration change applied to mitigate an industry vulnerability [1] [3].
2. What Cloudflare changed and why it mattered
To protect customers from CVE‑2025‑55182 and issues in React Server Components, Cloudflare rolled out configuration changes including increasing certain buffer settings to 1MB to match Next.js defaults; these mitigations were intended to protect traffic but coincided with disabling or changing logging and other controls — actions Cloudflare says triggered failures for a portion of its network [1] [3]. The protective intent was explicit in Cloudflare’s postmortem and status updates [1] [3].
3. Scale and impact: big provider, big ripple effects
This was not a niche outage. News outlets and monitoring services show a broad hit: reports included LinkedIn, Zoom, Shopify, Canva, Coinbase, Substack and others; monitoring site Downdetector spiked as errors rose and later subsided as fixes rolled out [2] [4]. Some coverage framed the event as affecting roughly 28% of Cloudflare’s traffic and lasting about half an hour [2].
4. Why “half of responses” can be intermittent and inconsistent
When a CDN or edge provider like Cloudflare experiences partial failures, client requests can be routed unpredictably: some go to healthy nodes and succeed; others hit degraded nodes and fail or return truncated results. That explains intermittent or partial content rather than a uniform outage — users and sites may see different symptoms depending on routing, cached content, and which Cloudflare POP handled their request [3] [4].
5. Multiple perspectives: engineering trade‑offs vs. operational risk
Cloudflare framed the incident as a defensive, necessary change to mitigate a recently disclosed vulnerability and says it was not an attack [1] [3]. Critics and commenters noted this outage came shortly after another major disruption in mid‑November, raising questions about operational risk at large centralized providers and the trade‑offs between rapid mitigation and careful rollouts [5] [6]. Hacker‑news style discussions emphasize that while centralized CDNs create efficiencies, they can amplify single points of failure [5].
6. What the reporting does and doesn’t say — limitations
News reports and Cloudflare’s own blog explain the incident timing, mitigation steps (like buffer changes to 1MB), and that disabling some logging contributed to the failure [1] [3]. Available sources do not mention whether your specific client, ISP, or application-level settings contributed to your “half responses,” nor do they provide a per‑user diagnostic for your case — diagnostic details at that granularity are not found in current reporting [1] [3].
7. Practical steps if you see partial responses during such events
Outage coverage recommends checking Cloudflare’s status page and Downdetector to confirm broader incidents, and for site operators to consider fallbacks, caching, or multi‑CDN architectures to reduce single‑provider risk — reporting notes many affected sites rely on Cloudflare and took disruptions as a reminder of that dependency [4] [6]. For end users, refreshing, waiting until the provider declares the fix, or switching networks may temporarily change routing enough to restore full responses [4].
8. Broader takeaway: protection measures can disrupt as well as defend
Cloudflare’s December 5 outage illustrates how mitigation against a serious vulnerability (CVE‑2025‑55182) can itself cause large-scale disruption when changes are rolled broadly and interact with live infrastructure; Cloudflare and multiple outlets are explicit about the protective motive and the unintended operational consequences [1] [3]. The episode fuels competing views: defenders argue swift mitigation is necessary; critics say rollout and testing processes need tightening to prevent collateral outages [1] [5].