Incident Library

Organisation

Cloudflare

Cloudflare · cloudflare

7 cases · 2020 to 2026

Root cause Configuration change2Capacity exhaustion1Cloud provider outage1DNS or network fault1Operator error1Software defect1
Component Database3BGP routing2CDN and edge network2Backbone network (WAN)1Coordination and key-value store1Database replication1Database failover manager1Transit gateway or network interconnect1NIC, cable and switch port link1Object storage1Recursive DNS resolver service1
Contributing factor Unverified assumption2Excessive blast radius2Harmful manual action2Monitoring blind spot2No configuration tests2No headroom2Retry storm2Automation amplification1Circular dependency1Change with a delayed effect1Cache-masked failure1No staged rollout1Overlapping failures1Partial rollout1Single point of failure1Gap in automated tests1Unsafe failure behaviour1
Symptom High error rate5High latency4Packet loss3Credentials unavailable2Service outage2Database overload1DNS resolution failures1Intermittent timeouts1Response quality degradation1Writes rejected1

Cases

  1. IL-0394 A Cloudflare router in Miami leaked IPv6 BGP routes to peers and providers for 25 minutes, congesting the backboneCloudflare · 2026

    Root cause Configuration change

  2. IL-0283 Cloudflare's core proxy returned HTTP 5xx across its network after loading an oversized Bot Management feature fileCloudflare · 2025

    Root cause Configuration change

  3. IL-0341 Traffic between Cloudflare and AWS us-east-1 had high latency, packet loss and origin failures for almost four hoursCloudflare · 2025

    Root cause Capacity exhaustion

  4. IL-0284 Workers KV failed 90.22% of requests in a third-party storage outage, breaking Access, WARP and many Cloudflare productsCloudflare · 2025

    Root cause Cloud provider outage

  5. IL-0378 All Cloudflare R2 object writes and about 35% of reads failed when the R2 Gateway could not authenticate to storageCloudflare · 2025

    Root cause Operator error

  6. IL-0340 Cloudflare's 1.1.1.1 resolver returned SERVFAIL to some valid DNS queries for four hoursCloudflare · 2023

    Root cause Software defect

  7. IL-0240 Cloudflare API requests failed and the dashboard slowed for hours after the authentication database lost its replicasCloudflare · 2020

    Root cause DNS or network fault