Back to Home11/18/2025, 11:35:10 AM

Cloudflare Global Network experiencing issues

2409 points
1626 comments

Mood

heated

Sentiment

negative

Category

tech

Key topics

Cloudflare outage

internet centralization

CDN reliability

Debate intensity80/100

Cloudflare's global network experienced issues, causing widespread disruptions to websites and services that rely on it, sparking concerns about internet centralization and the risks of relying on a single provider.

Snapshot generated from the HN discussion

Discussion Activity

Very active discussion

First comment

28s

Peak period

84

Hour 1

Avg / period

14.5

Comment distribution160 data points

Based on 160 loaded comments

Key moments

  1. 01Story posted

    11/18/2025, 11:35:10 AM

    1d ago

    Step 01
  2. 02First comment

    11/18/2025, 11:35:38 AM

    28s after posting

    Step 02
  3. 03Peak activity

    84 comments in Hour 1

    Hottest window of the conversation

    Step 03
  4. 04Latest activity

    11/19/2025, 12:28:31 AM

    18h ago

    Step 04

Generating AI Summary...

Analyzing up to 500 comments to identify key contributors and discussion patterns

Discussion (1626 comments)
Showing 160 comments of 1626
imdsm
1d ago
4 replies
alexdns
1d ago
1 reply
whats your chain of thought here ? a company that has nothing to do with azure is down because azure got ddosed 2 weeks ago ?
Jordan-117
1d ago
1 reply
Maybe that any actor sophisticated enough to take down Azure might also target Cloudflare?
hirako2000
1d ago
[delayed]
polisaez
1d ago
1 reply
Maybe related to their scheduled maintenance? https://www.cloudflarestatus.com/
chedabob
1d ago
I thought that as we're seeing issues with LON, but their Manchester POP is also down and that didn't have any maintenance this morning.
watermelon0
1d ago
Linked Microsoft blog article mentions that DDoS was in October.
pstation
1d ago
Ironically I can't even read the link in the article because cloudflare is down.
its_notjack
1d ago
2 replies
Ironically, DownDetector seems to be down because it protects its site with Cloudflare Turnstile... which is also down!
thrdbndndn
1d ago
1 reply
The report there for AWS also skyrocketed, but I guess it's probably false positives?
Macha
1d ago
1 reply
Even many non tech people have begun to associate Internet wide outages with “aws must be down” so I imagine many of them searching “is aws down” and for down detector, a hit is a down report, so it will report aws impacts even when the culprit is cloudflare in this case
mailund
1d ago
interesting, maybe "AWS is down" will become the new "the server is down" that some non-tech people throw around when anything unexpected happen on their computer?
imdsm
1d ago
I noticed this too!
imdsm
1d ago
1 reply
Internet is down, I guess I'll just look out of the window for a bit
break_the_bank
1d ago
1 reply
Ands its back. It was a very short window to look out of the window.
porridgeraisin
1d ago
Not too much window to see anyway
ndsipa_pomu
1d ago
1 reply
I was trying to look up banana-based jokes (https://upjoke.com/banana-jokes) and discovered that London Cloudflare seems to be down.

Then, I tried various down detecting sites and they didn't seem to work either - presumably due to Cloudflare.

bagpuss
1d ago
it's a slippery slope alright
itzjacki
1d ago
15 replies
A colleague of mine just came bursting through my office door in a panic, thinking he brought our site down since this happened just as he made some changes to our Cloudflare config. He was pretty relieved to see this post.
Freak_NL
1d ago
11 replies
Is there a word for that feeling of relief when someone else fucked up after initially thinking it was you?
StanAngeloff
1d ago
2 replies
Schadenfreude
simonklitj
1d ago
1 reply
Not quite, that’s more like taking pleasure in the misfortune of someone else. It’s close, but the specific relief bit that it is not _your_ misfortune is not captured
skottenborg
1d ago
1 reply
Internettet er vist ikke så stort :-)
simonklitj
1d ago
Fætter! Hvor genialt at se dig her. :)
gnfargbl
1d ago
2 replies
Nah, that's delight in someone else's misfortune. This is delight that the misfortune wasn't yours, which is slightly different.
StanAngeloff
1d ago
1 reply
4 years of German and I still don't quite "get" it :^) TY!
tagyro
1d ago
We have a saying:

You know how you measure eternity?

When you finish learning German.

namblooc
1d ago
1 reply
Katastrophenverursachererleichterung
LinXitoW
1d ago
1 reply
Katastrophenverursacherverlagerungserleichterung
namblooc
1d ago
Even better
jpmonette
1d ago
4 replies
phewphoria
zzzeek
1d ago
4 replies
it has to sound like a german word though
puilp0502
1d ago
2 replies
Is there a word for a feeling that there's gotta be a German word for this niche feeling?
usrusr
1d ago
You mean like when the Wortzusammensetzungsverdacht just hits you? (yeah, I just made that up, that's the beauty)
patneedham
1d ago
chrisweekly
1d ago
Entlastungvergnugen?
datenhorst
1d ago
puhphorie
Shugyousha
1d ago
Fremdverfehlungserleichterung?
Sholmesy
1d ago
Well, at least something good came out of this incident.

Perfect.

perihelions
1d ago
Oh, that's a good one.
Freak_NL
1d ago
Yup, that works.
shortrounddev2
1d ago
1 reply
When I'm debugging something, I'm not usually looking for the solution to the problem; I'm looking for sufficient evidence that I didn't cause the problem. Once I have that, the velocity at which I work slows down
sys_64738
1d ago
My manager once asked if he could have a "quick word". I said "velocity".
jspash
1d ago
4 replies
The problem is, I still get the wrong end of the stick when AWS or CF go down! Management doesn't care, understandably. They just want the money to keep coming in. It's hard to convince them that this is a pretty big problem. The only thing that will calm them down a bit is to tell them Twitter is also down. If that doesn't get them, I say ChatGPT is also down. Now NOBODY will get any work done! lol.
aurareturn
1d ago
1 reply
Every time a major cloud goes down, management tells us why don't we have a backup service that we can switch to. Then I tell them that a bunch of services worth a lot more than us are also down. Do you really want to spend the insane amount of resources to make sure our service stays up when the global internet is down?
ec109685
1d ago
Having an alt to Cloudflare isn’t preposterous.
adriand
1d ago
Haha yeah I just got off the phone and I said, look, either this gets fixed soon or there's going to be news headlines with photographs of giant queues of people milling around in airports.
graemep
1d ago
Who decided to go with AWS of CF? If its a management decision tell them you need the resources to have a fallback if they want their system to be more reliable than AWS or CF.
hylaride
1d ago
This is why you ALWAYS have a proposal ready. I literally had my ass saved by having tickets with reliability/redundancy work clearly laid out with comments by out of touch product/people managers deprioritizing the work after attempts to pull it off the backlog (in one infamous case for a notoriously poorly conceived and expensive failure of a project that haunted us again with lost opportunity cost).

The hilarious part of the whole story is that the same PMs and product managers were (and I cannot overemphasize this enough) absolutely militant orthodox agile practitioners with jira.

mcphage
1d ago
3 replies
Maybe this isn’t great, but I get a hint of that feeling when I’m on an airplane and hear a baby crying. For a number of years, if I heard a baby crying, it was probably my baby and I had to deal with it. But now my kids are past that phase, so when I hear the crying, after that initial jolt of panic I realize that it isn’t my problem, and that does give me the warm fuzzies. Even though I do feel bad for the baby and their parents.
RhysU
1d ago
You're not alone in this feeling. I occasionally smile when it's not my kid.
hackeraccount
1d ago
This is one of the secret joys of being a parent.
adriand
1d ago
Related situation: you're at a family gathering and everyone has young kids running around. You hear a thump, and then some kid starts screaming. Conversation stops and every parent keenly listens to the screams to try and figure out whose kid just got hurt, then some other parent jumps up - it's not your kid! #phewphoria
spamizbad
1d ago
2 replies
What’s funny is as I get older this feeling of relief turns more like a feeling of dread. The nice thing about problems that you cause is that you have considerable autonomy to fix them. Cloudflare goes down you’re sitting and waiting for a 3 party to fix something.
mewpmewp2
1d ago
2 replies
Why is it dread? I always feel good when big players mess up, as it makes me feel better about my own mess ups in life previously.
kasey_junk
1d ago
2 replies
Because my customers don’t (and shouldn’t care) it’s a third party. If I caused it there is a chance I can fix it.
_factor
1d ago
1 reply
So you would rather be incompetent than powerless? Choice of third party vendor on client facing services is still on you, so maybe you prefer your incompetence be more direct and tangible?

Even still, you should have policies in place to mitigate such eventualities, that way you can focus the incompetence into systematic issues instead.

At some point, the finger has to be pointed. Personally, I don't dread it pointing elsewhere. Just means I've done my due D and C.

shufflerofrocks
1d ago
Your priority (in this comment atleast) is about the finger-pointing, while the parent's priority is wanting a fix to the issue at hand.
mewpmewp2
1d ago
If customers expected third party downtime to not affect their thing then you shouldn't have picked a third party provider or spent extra resources on not having a single point of failure? If they were happy with choosing the third party with knowledge of depending on said third party provider, then it was an accepted risk.
twodave
1d ago
1 reply
Can’t speak for GP but ultimately I’d rather it be my fault or my company’s fault so I have something I can directly do for my customers who can’t use our software. The sense of dread isn’t about failure but feeling empathy for others who might not make payroll on time or whatever because my service that they rely on is down. And the second order effects, like some employee of a customer being unable to make rent or be forced to take out a short term loan or whatever. The fallout from something like this can have an unexpected human cost at times. Thankfully it’s Tuesday, not a critical payroll day for most employees.
mewpmewp2
1d ago
1 reply
But why does this case specifically matter? What if their system was down due to their WiFi or other layers beyond your software? Would you feel the same as well?

What about all the other systems and people suffering elsewhere in the World?

twodave
1d ago
I don't understand what point you're trying to make. Are you suggesting that if I can't feel empathy for everybody at once, or in every one of their circumstances, that I should not feel anything at all for anyone? That's not how anything works. Life (or, as I believe, God) brings us into contact with all kinds of people experiencing different levels of joy and pain. It's natural to empathize with the people you're around, whatever they're feeling. Don't over-complicate it.
sys_64738
1d ago
When others cause problems then you can put your feet up and surf the web waiting for resolution. Oh, wait.
bookofjoe
1d ago
1 reply
The German word “schadenfreude” means taking pleasure in someone else’s misfortune; enjoyment rather than relief.
bryanrasmussen
1d ago
1 reply
since schaden is damage and freude is joy, not sure what it should be - maybe Schadeleichtig hmm...
tauchunfall
1d ago
1 reply
>maybe Schadeleichtig

Maybe "Erleichterung" (relief)? But as a German "Schadenserleichterung" (also: notice the "s" between both compound word parts) rather sounds like a reduction of damage (since "Erleichterung" also means mitigation or alleviation).

bryanrasmussen
19h ago
right I thought of that at first and discarded it for that reason. Which the problem really is that the normal story of how Schadenfreude works as a bit of German language how to is that the component that it is other people's damage that is sparking joy is missing from the word itself, that interpretation must be known by the word user, if you were just creating the word and nobody had heard it before in the world it would be pretty reasonable for people to think you had just created a new word for masochism.
cromka
1d ago
vindication?
Rooster61
1d ago
Schadenfriend?

You gain relief, but you don't exactly derive pleasure as it's someone you know that's getting the ass end of the deal

hoistbypetard
21h ago
schadenfuckup
stonecharioteer
1d ago
It's close enough to Schadenfreude but not really.
sakisv
1d ago
5 replies
Well, you can never be sure that he didn't:

https://www.fastly.com/blog/summary-of-june-8-outage

itzjacki
1d ago
1 reply
Oh don't you worry. We are very much talking about the global outage as if he was the root cause. Like good colleagues :)
rapnie
1d ago
1 reply
Hmm, wait a minute.. maybe he was the cause! (no, kidding. just upping the pressure as a good peer :)
bryanrasmussen
1d ago
1 reply
are we truly good if we don't start a class action suit against this hapless scapegoat?!
conorcleary
1d ago
Just join the one we've started over in this cubicle!
CableNinja
1d ago
2 replies
Damn, imagine being the customer responsible for that, oof
whstl
1d ago
1 reply
I would be fine if it was my "fault", but I'm sure people in business would find a way to make me suffer.

But on a personal level, this is like ordering something at a restaurant and the cook burning the kitchen because they forgot to take out your pizza out of the oven or something.

sakisv
1d ago
I would be tempted to put it on my CV :D
WJW
1d ago
What do you imagine would be the result if you brought down cloudflare with a legitimate config update (ie not specifically crafted to trigger known bugs) while not even working for them? If I were the customer "responsible" for this outage, I'd just be annoyed that their software is apparently so fragile.
nevf1
1d ago
It's also what was the cause of the Azure Front Doors global outage two weeks ago - https://aka.ms/air/YKYN-BWZ

"A specific sequence of customer configuration changes, performed across two different control plane build versions, resulted in incompatible customer configuration metadata being generated. These customer configuration changes themselves were valid and non-malicious – however they produced metadata that, when deployed to edge site servers, exposed a latent bug in the data plane. This incompatibility triggered a crash during asynchronous processing within the data plane service. This defect escaped detection due to a gap in our pre-production validation, since not all features are validated across different control plane build versions."

Bloomy22
1d ago
I'm pretty sure I crashed Gmail using something weird in its filters. It was a few years ago. Every time I did something specific (I don't remember what), it would freeze and then display a 502 error for a while.
srmarm
1d ago
> May 12, we began a software deployment that introduced a bug that could be triggered by a specific customer configuration under specific circumstances.

I'd love to know more about what those specific circumstances were!

bamboozled
1d ago
1 reply
How do we know your colleagues changes didn't take down Cloudflare though?
itzjacki
1d ago
1 reply
Good point. We should probably assume they did, until proven otherwise.
puilp0502
1d ago
Guilty until proven innocent.
dcjdfvk
1d ago
1 reply
Even pornhub is down becuase it uses clouflare.
carlos_rpn
1d ago
Is Cloudflare being down the work of conservative hackers and the rest of the internet is just collateral damage?
arbuge
1d ago
1 reply
Tell him it's worse than he thinks. He obviously brought the entire Cloudflare system down.
mlrtime
1d ago
5 replies
You joke and I think its funny, but as a junior engineer I would be quite proud if some small change I made was able to take down the mighty Cloudflare.
throwup238
1d ago
2 replies
If I were Cloudflare it would mean an immediate job offer well above market. That junior engineer is either a genius or so lucky that they must be bred by Pierson’s Puppeteers or such a perfect manifestation of a human fuzzer that their skills must be utilized.
ethmarks
1d ago
2 replies
A Ringworld reference in the wild?
throwup238
1d ago
1 reply
I never thought I'd get the chance, but then my Claude Code on Web credits ran out and I had to find another way to entertain myself.
UltraSane
22h ago
1 reply
Even after 20 projects I have only used $60 of my $250
throwup238
18h ago
I think the rate limits for Claude Code on the Web include VM time in general and not just LLM tokens. I have a desktop app with a full end to end testing suite which the agent would run for every session that probably burned up quite a bit.
zarathustreal
1d ago
Internet points demand obscure references these days. My system prompt has its own area code
anvuong
1d ago
1 reply
This reminds of a friend I had in college. We were assigned to the same group coding an advanced calculator in C. This guy didn't know anything about programming (he was mostly focused on his side biz of selling collector sneakers), so we assigned him to do all the testing, his job was to come up with weird equations and weird but valid way to present them to the calculator. And this dude somehow managed to crash almost all of our iterations except the few last ones. Really put the joke about a programmer, a tester, and a customer walk into a bar into perspective.
jrochkind1
23h ago
[delayed]
aws_ls
1d ago
1 reply
Well its easy to cause damage by messing up the `rm` command, esp with `-fr` options. So don't take it as a proxy for some great skill which is required to cause damage.
ethmarks
1d ago
You could easily cause great damage to your Cloudflare setup, but CF has measures to prevent random customers deleting stuff from taking down the entire service globally. Unless you have admin access to the entire CF system, you can't really cause much damage with rm.
zidad
1d ago
You might want to consider migrating to Azure Front Door if that's a feature you like: https://www.infoq.com/news/2025/11/azure-afd-control-plane-f...
methyl
1d ago
I kind of did that back in the days when they released Worker KV, I tried to bulk upload a lot of data and it brought the whole service down, can confirm I was proud :D
amalcon
1d ago
It's also not exactly the least common way that this sort of huge multi-tenant service goes down. It's only as rare as it is because more or less all of them have had such outages in the past and built generic defenses (e.g. automated testing of customer changes, gradual rollout, automatic rollback, there are others but those are the ones that don't require any further explanation).
disconnection
1d ago
Good that he worked it out so quick. I recently spent a day debugging email problems on Railway PaaS, because they silently closed an SMTP port without telling anyone.
raxxorraxor
1d ago
Did your colleague perhaps change the Cloudflare config again right now? Seems to be down again.
nrhrjrjrjtntbt
1d ago
The company where this colleague works? Cloudflare.
belter
1d ago
Wait for the post mortem ... It is a technical possibility, race condition propagates one customer config to all nodes... :-)
0xblinq
1d ago
Do you guys work at Cloudflare? Do you mind reverting that change just in case?
NitpickLawyer
1d ago
You missed a great opportunity to dead-pan him with something like "No, Bob, not just our site, you brought down the entire Internet, look at this post!"
sefke
1d ago
I woke up getting bombarded by multiple clients messages of sites not working, I shitted my pants because I've changed the config just yesterday. When I saw the status message "cloudflare down" I was so relieved.
0xblinq
1d ago
Plot twist: They work at Cloudflare
ants_everywhere
1d ago
Chances are still good that somewhere within Cloudflare someone really did do a global configuration push that brought down the internet.

When aliens study humans from this period, their book of fairy tales will include several where a terrible evil was triggered by a config push.

theoldgreybeard
1d ago
You should tell him his config change took down half the internet.
pySilver
1d ago
1 reply
Our company is loosing money with every second of downtime.
Vista2003
1d ago
Unfortunately downtime is just the cost of doing business. Everyone else using Cloudflare is in the same boat.
Folyd
1d ago
1 reply
Insane, my website https://geddle.com totally down
dutchbrit
1d ago
1 reply
seems to work here
Folyd
1d ago
down again, all my website rely on Cloudflare DNS are down
herbst
1d ago
2 replies
Some of my websites are down. Says it's the cloudflare network, when I click it it says generic things about my server likely being the issue.
MrKh4n
1d ago
Yes, most of things are down, recapthca, dns routing, proxy, etc.
j0nimost
1d ago
all of my websites are down
break_the_bank
1d ago
7 replies
Update: It seems to be back, the downtime lasted maybe 5-6 minutes
techguy1954
1d ago
It came back up for me, now it's down again. EDIT: I am in the UK, using the London Cloudflare server.
Sammi
1d ago
It was down, then up, then back down for me.

EDIT: And it's back up.

EDIT EDIT: And it's back down lol

Batman8675309
1d ago
Still down for me.
break_the_bank
1d ago
Spoke too soon. The "internet" is down again.
astonfred
1d ago
Down again in London
its_notjack
1d ago
Looks like it's going up and down intermittently, maybe something is only half-rolled-out.
ndsipa_pomu
1d ago
I'm still seeing some sites not working - ironically they're down detectors:

https://statusfield.com/status/cloudflare https://statusgator.com/services/cloudflare

robotfelix
1d ago
1 reply
Back up for me now
fspoettel
1d ago
1 reply
Down again
robotfelix
1d ago
Yep - down again for me too!
bratao
1d ago
1 reply
The danger of Internet centralization in Cloudflare
snitty
1d ago
1 reply
That's why I run my server on 7100 chips made for me by Sam Zeloof in his garage on a software stack hand coded by me, on copper I ran personally to everyone's house.
cuu508
1d ago
You are joking but working on making decentralization more viable would indeed be more healthy than throwing hands up and accepting Cloudflare as the only option.
mittermayr
1d ago
1 reply
Funny how I trusted Cloudflare first and started looking at restarting my servers, only to realize it's not me this time :)
herbst
1d ago
The error even kinda says that. Still assumed it's me
js4ever
1d ago
1 reply
Cloudflare fully down for me and my team, half of internet just vanished
teitoklien
1d ago
Same we use cloudflare as image cdn and its R2 service a lot, cant access anything over its cdn route
mrintegrity
1d ago
1 reply
It's insane to me that big internet uptime monitoring tools like Pingdom and Downdetector both seem to rely on Cloudflare, as both of those are currently unavailable as well.
stupidityonmaxx
1d ago
down detector works in serbia
re-thc
1d ago
1 reply
Downflare
DC-3
1d ago
Cloudflare'nt
skrebbel
1d ago
yep
vldszn
1d ago
Also seeing this on my websites hosted on cloudflare
Terr_
1d ago
I'm thinking about all those quips from a few decades back, along the lines of: "The Internet is resilient, it's distributed and it routes around damage" etc.

In many ways it's still true, but it doesn't feel like a given anymore.

zx76
1d ago
Unfortunately it seems like it, our service has lost a portion of our Cloudflare connectivity. We use their tunnels functionality.

Additionally, it looks like Pingdom/Solarwinds authentication is affected too - not a great look for a service in that category.

surrTurr
1d ago
x is also not working properly
robotfelix
1d ago
Back up for me now

Edit: and then back down again

denuoweb
1d ago
Browser Working, Portland Cloudflare Error, apps.ideal-logic.com Host Working
A_Venom_Roll
1d ago
Looks like it. Even sites like isup.me seem to be down, lots of cloudflare error messages across the net
hirako2000
1d ago
Not affected using tunnels, CDNs.

it's probably related to the recent ddos attacks they helped mitigating.

cbility
1d ago
Getting a 500 error from cloudflare in Manchester
ilaksh
1d ago
When this kind of thing happens it makes me feel better about my own programming problems.

I wonder if it has anything to do with the replicate.com purchase? Probably not.

Filligree
1d ago
It's the first time it's been down that I've seen a sensible error message.

But I was supposed to be commuting, so I guess I'll do that.

Genego
1d ago
Yes (Asia)
sammy2255
1d ago
Turnstile is throwing 500 internal server error
pavo-etc
1d ago
Saw cloudflare go down before my very eyes on colonist.io in Australia
re-thc
1d ago
Downflare

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