Cloudflare Outage Expands: Multiple Consecutive Updates as Investigation Intensifies

Cloudflare’s global network outage continues to evolve, with the company issuing multiple updates confirming that engineers are still actively investigating a widespread incident affecting millions of websites, APIs, and services worldwide. The latest update, posted at 12:21 UTC, indicates that despite ongoing work, Cloudflare has not yet identified the root cause of the disruption.

The outage, which initially triggered widespread HTTP 500 errors and failures across the Cloudflare Dashboard and API, remains one of the most significant network events Cloudflare has experienced in recent years.

Latest Official Cloudflare Updates

🕒 12:21 UTC — Update

“We are continuing to investigate this issue.”

🕒 12:03 UTC — Update

“We are continuing to investigate this issue.”

🕒 11:48 UTC — Investigating

“Cloudflare is aware of, and investigating an issue which impacts multiple customers: Widespread 500 errors, Cloudflare Dashboard and API also failing. We are working to understand the full impact and mitigate this problem. More updates to follow shortly.”

These messages confirm that the issue is ongoing and affecting multiple Cloudflare services simultaneously — a sign of a potentially deep-rooted internal system failure.

What’s Currently Impacted?

Based on Cloudflare’s own reports and global user feedback, the following systems are affected:

⚠️ Widespread 500 Internal Server Errors

Millions of websites are returning:

• 500 Internal Server Error
• 502/503 Gateway errors
• Connection timeouts

This suggests a major failure in Cloudflare’s global edge processing layer.

⚠️ Cloudflare Dashboard Outage

Customers are unable to:

• Log into the dashboard
• Change DNS settings
• Modify firewall rules
• Access Zero Trust security features
• Manage Workers and Pages deployments

This severely limits businesses’ ability to react to the incident.

⚠️ Cloudflare API Disruption

Automated systems relying on Cloudflare’s API are also failing:

• DNS automation scripts
• Deployment workflows
• Security rule synchronization
• Bot mitigation updates
• SaaS platform integrations

This can break CI/CD pipelines and enterprise security systems.

Why This Outage Is Significant

Cloudflare routes a substantial percentage of global internet traffic. When Cloudflare fails, the effects are instantaneous and widespread.

Today’s outage affects:

• Websites (slow loading or fully down)
• Mobile apps (API failures)
• E-commerce (checkout errors)
• Corporate systems (authentication failures)
• SaaS providers (dashboard timeouts)
• Developers (deployments blocked)

Because Cloudflare acts as a reverse proxy, firewall, CDN, DNS provider, and security layer, an outage in any of these regions can cascade across the entire internet.

Possible Root Causes (Speculative Until Official Statement)

Cloudflare has not yet disclosed any root cause, but the pattern of symptoms aligns with several potential triggers:

1. Global configuration push failure

Cloudflare regularly updates its global rules and routing tables.
A faulty update could cause:

• Edge server crashes
• Routing loops
• 500-level errors across regions

2. Internal service failure (cache, routing, authentication)

If a core internal system fails, all dependent services break automatically.

3. BGP routing issue

Cloudflare relies heavily on BGP announcements.
A global BGP issue can create:

• unreachable datacenters
• packet loss
• cascading 500 errors

4. Attack or overload

Large-scale DDoS mitigation failures could overwhelm Cloudflare’s nodes.

Impact on Global Businesses

The outage is significant for organizations that depend on Cloudflare’s infrastructure:

Business consequences

• Revenue loss for e-commerce platforms
• API-driven services failing
• Customer support overload
• Broken authentication systems
• Latency and global packet delays

Technical consequences

• DNS records unreachable
• Workers and Pages deployment failures
• Internal dashboards frozen
• CI/CD pipelines aborting

Given how deeply Cloudflare is integrated into modern web architectures, even a short outage can have outsized operational effects.

What Cloudflare Is Doing Now

Based on the ongoing updates, Cloudflare is:

• continuing internal investigation
• assessing the breadth of the impact
• attempting to mitigate the issue
• isolating the failure point
• preparing additional updates

Typically, Cloudflare engineers will:

1. Review global routing changes
2. Roll back recent deployments
3. Re-route traffic through stable POPs
4. Restart internal services
5. Issue a detailed postmortem once resolved

Given the severity, a full fix may take additional time.

Conclusion: A Rapidly Evolving Global Outage

The latest updates show that Cloudflare’s engineers are still working to understand the full extent of the disruption. With multiple consecutive “We are continuing to investigate” messages, it’s clear that the company is still searching for the root cause.

This outage, impacting 500 errors, the Dashboard, and API access, continues to disrupt major parts of the global internet. More detailed information is expected soon as Cloudflare works toward resolution.