Cloudflare Global Network Outage: Investigation Ongoing as Services Remain Unstable

Cloudflare is currently experiencing a major global network disruption affecting millions of websites, web applications, APIs, and online services. Multiple official updates throughout the day confirm that the company is still investigating the root cause, and although partial recovery has been observed, significant instability remains.

As of 12:53 UTC, Cloudflare engineers continue to investigate the incident.

🟥 Summary of Today’s Incident

Cloudflare first acknowledged the issue at 11:48 UTC, reporting widespread 500 errors, Dashboard and API outages, and internal service degradation.

Since then, Cloudflare has issued several updates:

• 12:53 UTC — Still investigating
• 12:37 UTC — Still investigating
• 12:21 UTC — Partial recovery but high error rates
• 12:03 UTC — Still investigating
• 11:48 UTC — Initial acknowledgment of internal service degradation

The continued “investigating” status indicates Cloudflare has not yet fully isolated or resolved the root problem.

🕒 Full Timeline of Cloudflare’s Updates

12:53 UTC — Update

“We are continuing to investigate this issue.”

12:37 UTC — Update

“We are continuing to investigate this issue.”

12:21 UTC — Update

“We are seeing services recover, but customers may continue to observe higher-than-normal error rates as we continue remediation efforts.”

12:03 UTC — Update

“We are continuing to investigate this issue.”

11:48 UTC — Investigating

“Cloudflare is experiencing an internal service degradation. Some services may be intermittently impacted.”

🌍 What’s Impacted?

Because Cloudflare sits in front of a massive percentage of the modern web, the outage caused immediate worldwide disruptions.

Affected services include:

• Websites & applications showing 500/502/503 errors
• Cloudflare Dashboard unreachable or partially loading
• Cloudflare API failing or timing out
• Workers / Pages deployment issues
• Zero Trust / Access authentication problems
• CDN performance degraded in multiple regions
• DNS resolution intermittently unstable

Even partial instability in Cloudflare’s network can cause widespread disruptions across many industries.

⚠️ Why This Outage Is Significant

Cloudflare’s infrastructure is deeply integrated into the global internet. Any internal degradation can create ripple effects that impact:

• E-commerce transactions
• SaaS platforms
• API-based services
• Authentication systems
• Developer workflows
• Financial and enterprise systems

Today's outage appears more complex than a localized incident. The fact that Cloudflare continues to investigate suggests:

• A multi-layered internal failure
• Possible routing instability
• A problematic configuration deployment
• Internal microservice or orchestration failures

Cloudflare has not yet provided a root-cause explanation.

🔍 Possible Technical Causes (Speculative)

While Cloudflare hasn’t published a detailed analysis yet, outages with similar symptoms often stem from:

1. Global configuration mistakes

A misconfigured update to:

• WAF
• Rate limiting
• Proxy logic
• Internal routing rules

…could instantly disrupt all edge locations.

2. BGP routing issues

Cloudflare relies on BGP-based Anycast routing. Even small misconfigurations can remove entire PoPs from the global network.

3. Internal service degradation

Cloudflare notes “internal service degradation,” which often refers to failures in:

• cache clusters
• internal API layers
• orchestration services
• authentication stacks

4. Overload or cascading failure

High load or repeated service restarts can cause further instability across global data centers.

📉 Real-World Impact

Because Cloudflare supports a large share of global internet traffic, the outage likely affected millions of users and thousands of businesses.

Expected business impacts:

• Failed checkout flows
• Broken login systems
• Delayed or failed API calls
• Slowed website performance
• Interruptions in deployments
• Increased customer support load
• Revenue loss for online services

Outages of this scale highlight how dependent the web is on Cloudflare's ecosystem.

🔧 What Cloudflare Is Doing Now

Cloudflare engineers are:

• Investigating the primary cause
• Isolating problematic internal services
• Rebalancing global traffic
• Rolling back recent changes
• Monitoring stabilization across PoPs
• Preparing additional updates

Recovery may be gradual, with intermittent failures continuing during the process.

📢 What Customers Should Do

While Cloudflare works on remediation, customers should:

• Avoid making large DNS or firewall changes until stability is confirmed
• Expect intermittent failures
• Use fallback routing (if available)
• Monitor the Cloudflare status page for updates
• Inform internal teams about possible disruptions

📌 Conclusion

The Cloudflare global network outage continues to evolve, with sustained investigation efforts and intermittent service instability. Although partial recovery has begun, the elevated error rates and repeated investigation notices indicate that the underlying issue is still unresolved.

Given Cloudflare's central role in powering a large portion of the internet, outages like this demonstrate the interconnected nature of global digital infrastructure—and the impact when one of its core pillars experiences downtime.

A full post-incident report is expected once Cloudflare has resolved the issue and completed a root-cause analysis.