Cloudflare has resolved a major outage that briefly disrupted large parts of the internet on Tuesday, temporarily knocking major websites offline and causing widespread “500 internal server error” messages.
The disruption began early in the day, when Cloudflare acknowledged availability issues affecting its support portal. Within 30 minutes, the company issued warnings that its Global Network — a massive infrastructure spanning over 330 cities and more than 120 countries — was experiencing widespread failures.
“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,” the company said.
The network provides content delivery, DDoS protection, and performance services through more than 449 Tbps of global edge capacity and direct links to 13,000+ networks, including major ISPs, cloud providers, enterprises, and online platforms.
Even platforms not directly hosted on Cloudflare experienced massive spikes in error reports, such as Spotify, Twitter, OpenAI, AWS, League of Legends, and Google, suggesting major services were impacted either directly or indirectly through Cloudflare-dependent infrastructure.
A Routine Update Meets A Hidden Bug
Dane Knecht, Cloudflare’s Chief Technology Officer (CTO), addressed the outage shortly in a direct and unusually candid statement on X (formerly Twitter). He apologized and explained what went wrong.
“I won’t mince words: earlier today we failed our customers and the broader Internet when a problem in @Cloudflare network impacted large amounts of traffic that rely on us. The sites, businesses, and organizations that rely on Cloudflare depend on us being available and I apologize for the impact that we caused,” Knecht wrote.
“Transparency about what happened matters, and we plan to share a breakdown with more details in a few hours. In short, a latent bug in a service underpinning our bot mitigation capability started to crash after a routine configuration change we made. That cascaded into a broad degradation to our network and other services. This was not an attack.”
Stages Of Recovery
Cloudflare’s network began experiencing significant failures to deliver core network traffic at 11:28 UTC. At 11:31 UTC, the first automated test detected the issue, and manual investigation started at 11:32 UTC. The incident call was created at 11:35 UTC. By 14:30 UTC, the main impact was resolved, and downstream impacted services started observing reduced errors.
As engineers continued remediation efforts, the company acknowledged that analytics, logs, and dashboard tools continued to experience delays into the afternoon. Finally, at 17:06 UTC — six hours after the outage began — Cloudflare announced that all downstream services had restarted and all operations had been fully restored.
“Cloudflare services are currently operating normally. We are no longer observing elevated errors or latency across the network,” the company confirmed.
“Our engineering teams continue to closely monitor the platform and perform a deeper investigation into the earlier disruption, but no configuration changes are being made at this time.”
Knecht emphasized that Cloudflare is investigating how such a latent fault went undetected and is working on long-term improvements to prevent similar issues.
“The trust our customers place in us is what we value the most,” he said. “We are going to do what it takes to earn that back.”
A Growing Pattern Of Infrastructure Failures
This latest disruption fits into a worrying pattern for the backbone of the internet. Earlier this year, Cloudflare dealt with a June outage that crippled Zero Trust WARP traffic, followed by a sweeping DNS issue in October that took out millions of AWS-hosted websites.
And the problem isn’t limited to Cloudflare. Just last month, AWS and Azure also suffered major outages, reminding users that the largest cloud providers — despite their scale — remain far from infallible.
Together, these incidents reveal an uncomfortable truth about today’s internet that even a minor internal error within a backbone provider like Cloudflare can trigger global consequences.
