A major internet disruption unfolded today as Cloudflare, a critical backbone for millions of websites, reported widespread issues with its Dashboard and APIs, resulting in 500 Internal Server Errors across the globe.
What Happened?
The outage, confirmed on Cloudflare’s status page, began around 08:56 UTC, impacting management tools, automations, and integrations that rely on these services. While edge services like CDN caching and security features remained operational, administrative access for developers and businesses was severely affected.
Cloudflare announced it was actively investigating the issue, warning customers about failed requests and error displays when accessing the Dashboard or APIs.
Possible Cause: Scheduled Maintenance
The incident coincided with scheduled maintenance in key U.S. datacenters, including:
- DTW (Detroit): 09:00–13:00 UTC
- ORD (Chicago): 07:00–11:00 UTC
Although described as routine, the timing amplified the chaos, with some reports linking it to broader service degradation. Maintenance rerouted traffic and increased latency, adding to the disruption.
Impact on Businesses and Platforms
The ripple effects hit high-profile platforms hard:
- Trading apps like Zerodha, Groww, and Angel One faced login failures and order placement issues during market hours.
- Design tool Canva, AI services like Claude and Perplexity, and even Downdetector slowed or went offline.
Social media buzzed with complaints, highlighting the risks of relying on a few providers for global internet stability.
Cloudflare’s Response
Cloudflare stated a fix had been implemented and is monitoring results. Users are urged to subscribe for updates via email, PagerDuty, or webhooks.
This outage follows similar disruptions in November and September 2025, raising questions about resilience in an internet increasingly dependent on centralized infrastructure.
Additional Updates
- Cloudflare is investigating increased errors for customers using Workers scripts.
- Scheduled maintenance continues in the BOG datacenter (10:00–12:00 UTC), which may cause latency and temporary network interface unavailability.
