Dane Knecht

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Cloudflare’s 2025 outages expose fragility in internet infrastructure

Technical leader addressing recurrent 2026 outages via public apologies and explanations

From November 2025 through February 2026, Cloudflare suffered multiple major global outages, including a three-hour disruption on November 18, 2025, a 25–30 minute WAF misconfiguration incident on December 5, 2025, a BGP routing failure on January 22, 2026, and edge network instability on February 4, 2026. These events temporarily took down services like LinkedIn, Zoom, Shopify, Coinbase, ChatGPT, X, Spotify, and others that rely on Cloudflare's edge network, content delivery, and security services, affecting a significant portion of global HTTP traffic during peaks.

Updated May 9

Notable Quotes

Paraphrased from reporting: Knecht confirmed that the failure was caused by a change in Cloudflare’s Web Application Firewall request parsing logic and that the company had fully restored operations, stressing that it was not the result of a cyberattack.

from Cloudflare’s 2025 outages expose fragility in internet infrastructure · Updated May 9

“In short, a latent bug in a service underpinning our bot mitigation capability started to crash after a routine configuration change we made. That cascaded into a broad degradation of our network and other services. This was not an attack.” (Dane Knecht, Feb. 4, 2026)[2]

from Cloudflare’s 2025 outages expose fragility in internet infrastructure · Updated May 9

“I won't mince words: earlier today we failed our customers and the broader Internet when a problem in [Cloudflare's] network impacted large amounts of traffic that rely on us." (Dane Knecht on X, Feb. 4, 2026)[4]

from Cloudflare’s 2025 outages expose fragility in internet infrastructure · Updated May 9