What actually happened during the recent Cloudflare outage? 

You probably noticed on the 18th November, parts of your website felt slow, unresponsive or briefly unavailable. Well, this wasn’t just you –  a major Cloudflare outage affected sites and services across the internet.

We know how worrying it is when something goes down unexpectedly, so we wanted to share a straightforward explanation of what happened, what it meant for your site, and what happens next. 

Cloudflare has now published its breakdown of the event, but here’s our take on the situation.

What is Cloudflare, and why did it affect your sites?

Cloudflare sits between your website and the wider internet, acting like a high-speed, security-focused buffer. It’s used by millions of organisations (including many of our clients) because it provides:

• Faster loading times
• Protection against cyber attacks
• Reliable routing of traffic
• Secure authentication and login checks
• Tools to detect bots and harmful automated traffic
  

Because Cloudflare operates as a global network layer, most website requests pass through it before reaching your site. That means if something goes wrong in their systems, it can temporarily prevent users from accessing your site – even if your hosting, code, or infrastructure is running perfectly.

What actually went wrong?

Cloudflare’s outage was caused by a technical misconfiguration in their Bot Management system, which helps identify real users versus automated traffic.

Here’s what happened:

• A change to an internal database produced a faulty configuration file that contained duplicate entries
• The file was larger than expected, which caused the routing software in their network to fail
• Because this file was regenerated every few minutes, the network repeatedly flipped between working and failing states
  

The result? Widespread HTTP 5xx errors, temporary login issues, and intermittent site disruption for many platforms.

Importantly, this was not a cyber attack. It was a cascade triggered by a single misconfigured file.

How long did the outage last?

• Problems started around 11:20 UTC, with users seeing errors or being unable to access Cloudflare-secured services
• Cloudflare engineers identified the root cause and began mitigating the issue by early afternoon
• A corrected configuration file was deployed globally at 14:30 UTC, restoring most services
• All systems were fully operational again by 17:06 UTC

Were Hiyield clients affected?

Yes – unfortunately, some services experienced:

• Temporary site inaccessibility 
• Slower response times 
• Authentication failures on sites using Cloudflare-protected log flows

But we want to reassure you, no data was at risk, and everything returned to normal once Cloudflare completed their rollback and system resets. 

What’s being done to prevent this again?

Cloudflare has committed to several improvements, including:

• Strengthening validation for automatically-generated configuration files
• Introducing more robust “kill switches” when issues emerge
• Preventing debugging tools from overwhelming systems during incidents
• Improving safeguards across their core proxy modules

They’ve acknowledged this was their most severe outage since 2019 – and that it didn’t meet the high reliability standards they set for themselves.

Should we stop using Cloudflare

In short: no.

Cloudflare is still one of the most robust and secure platforms available. Outages of this scale are rare, and what matters most is how quickly the provider responds (which they did) and the improvements they put in place afterwards.

We’ll continue monitoring Cloudflare’s updates and share relevant insights once their full post-incident analysis is released.

For now, everything is operating normally. If you’d like to talk through how this affected your site, we’re here to help.