Cloudflare experienced a severe global outage that disrupted major internet services, causing widespread 500 errors and availability failures across its network. Users attempting to access affected websites encountered "internal server error" messages as Cloudflare’s distributed infrastructure—spanning more than 330 cities and connecting to over 13,000 networks—suffered a sudden breakdown.
The incident began with Cloudflare acknowledging issues in its support portal before escalating into a full-scale disruption across its Global Network. The company confirmed failures in its dashboard, API, and traffic management systems, prompting a rapid internal investigation. Monitoring platforms like Downdetector registered tens of thousands of reports, with Europe appearing to be heavily impacted, as nodes in cities including Frankfurt, Amsterdam, Stockholm, Zurich, and Berlin went offline.
Numerous online platforms—from Spotify and X to OpenAI, AWS, Google, Perplexity, and major gaming services—also experienced connectivity issues, reflecting the deep dependence of the internet on Cloudflare’s infrastructure, which supports roughly one-fifth of all websites.
Cloudflare CTO Dane Knecht later explained that the hours-long outage stemmed from a “latent bug” in a core service powering the company’s bot mitigation system. A routine configuration update triggered the flaw, causing a cascading failure across the network. Knecht stressed that the incident was not caused by a cyberattack. Instead, a configuration file unexpectedly grew beyond its intended size, overwhelming the service responsible for traffic routing.
Cloudflare engineers moved quickly, identifying the issue and deploying fixes that restored key components like Access and WARP. Full recovery was confirmed six hours later, although some users continued to notice elevated error rates during remediation.
Knecht issued a public apology, acknowledging Cloudflare’s responsibility for the disruption and pledging a detailed post-mortem. The incident underscores the fragility of centralized internet infrastructure—where a single unnoticed software bug can ripple across the digital ecosystem, affecting millions globally and interrupting critical online services.
Cloudflare has reaffirmed its commitment to transparency and reliability, promising corrective measures to prevent similar failures in the future.
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