Cloudflare outage causes widespread 500 errors — services starting to recover

Cloudflare is facing a large outage that has generated widespread 500 server errors across its network, with its Dashboard and API affected. The company reports services are starting to recover, but customers may continue to see higher‑than‑normal error rates as engineers work to fully resolve the issue.

Because Cloudflare provides CDN, DNS and security services for millions of websites and apps, an outage can cause downstream failures across many companies and services. Notably, Downdetector — which tracks service disruptions — was also impacted and showed degraded functionality during the incident.

What a 500 error means

A 500 HTTP error is a generic server‑side failure: it means the server encountered an unexpected condition that prevented it from fulfilling the request. In Cloudflare’s case, these errors reflect problems within its edge network or control plane rather than individual customer sites.

Who’s affected

• Websites and APIs using Cloudflare for CDN, DNS, WAF or DDoS protection may experience errors, slowdowns or partial outages.
• Developers using Cloudflare’s Dashboard or API could be blocked from managing configurations, deployments or analytics during the incident.
• Downstream services that rely on Cloudflare for availability can see customer‑facing issues even if their own infrastructure is healthy.

What to do if you’re impacted

• Check Cloudflare’s official status page for updates: https://www.cloudflarestatus.com.
• Monitor your users’ reports and logs to identify which services are failing and whether issues are client‑side or network‑wide.
• If possible, temporarily enable failovers, use alternate DNS providers, or route critical traffic through backups while Cloudflare resolves the incident.
• Communicate proactively with customers if you operate a public service — transparency during outages helps maintain trust.

Privacy and resilience reminders

Outages at major infrastructure providers highlight the importance of designing redundancy into internet‑facing systems. Use multi‑CDN setups, secondary DNS, and health‑check driven failover to reduce single‑point failures. Also, avoid relying on vendor dashboards for critical alerts; integrate monitoring that is independent of a single provider.

We’ll update this post as Cloudflare releases more information. For the moment, if you rely on Cloudflare, check the status page and your monitoring tools and follow any mitigation guidance from Cloudflare support.

Discussion: Are you seeing errors right now? How have previous CDN outages changed the way you design reliability for your services?