Matthew Prince

Built World

Leading post-incident response and policy discussions

On February 16, 2026, a misconfigured routing update at Cloudflare's Ashburn data center cascaded across the internet, taking down X for three hours and degrading AWS's largest region. Thousands of other websites went down too. The error took 40 minutes to identify but four hours to fix because corrupted routing tables spread to upstream providers.

Updated May 29

Money Moves

Leading Cloudflare's AI economy strategy

For two years, AI companies have trained their models on web content without paying for most of it. That era may be ending.

Updated May 21

Built World

Publicly accountable for repeated outages through early 2026 and ongoing reliability reforms

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