Is Cloudflare Down? How to Check and What to Do

Websites are returning 502 errors. Pages show "Error 522: Connection timed out." Your DNS is not resolving. If Cloudflare is having problems, the blast radius is enormous. Cloudflare sits in front of millions of websites, handling DNS, CDN, DDoS protection, and edge computing for a significant portion of the internet. When it goes down, the impact is felt far beyond any single site.

This guide covers how to check if Cloudflare is down, what typically causes Cloudflare outages, and what you can do while the service recovers.

How to Check if Cloudflare Is Down

Cloudflare powers so many websites and services that a Cloudflare outage can look like "the internet is broken." Here is how to determine whether Cloudflare is the problem.

Check the Official Cloudflare Status Page

Cloudflare maintains a detailed status page that should be your first stop.

The page lists individual components: CDN, DNS (1.1.1.1), Cloudflare Workers, R2 Storage, Cloudflare Pages, Stream, Access, and more. During an incident, Cloudflare posts updates with technical detail about the root cause and estimated time to resolution. Cloudflare also breaks status down by geographic region, so you can see if the problem is global or isolated to specific data centers.

Cloudflare publishes a historical uptime view on the status page. This is useful for determining whether current performance issues are part of a larger pattern.

Use Is That Down

Is That Down monitors Cloudflare's status page automatically and sends alerts the moment an incident is reported. Instead of refreshing cloudflarestatus.com manually, you get a notification in your inbox, Slack channel, or webhook the moment something changes. For a broader guide to service monitoring, see how to check if a service is down.

Check Third-Party Outage Trackers

Downdetector tracks Cloudflare outages based on user reports. A sudden spike in reports is a strong indicator that Cloudflare is experiencing issues. Because Cloudflare is infrastructure-level rather than consumer-level, Downdetector reports often come from website operators who notice their sites returning Cloudflare error pages.

Look at the Error Page

Cloudflare error pages are distinctive and often tell you what is wrong:

• Error 502 Bad Gateway: Cloudflare reached the origin server, but the origin returned an invalid response. This may be a Cloudflare issue or an origin server issue.
• Error 520: Cloudflare received an unexpected response from the origin. Often an origin problem.
• Error 521: The origin server refused the connection from Cloudflare. Usually the origin is down, not Cloudflare.
• Error 522: Connection timed out between Cloudflare and the origin. Can be either side.
• Error 523: Origin is unreachable. Typically a DNS or routing problem.
• Error 524: Cloudflare connected to the origin but the origin did not respond in time.

If you see these errors on multiple unrelated websites, the problem is likely Cloudflare-side. If you only see them on one site, the origin server for that site is probably the issue.

Test From Multiple Locations

Because Cloudflare operates data centers in over 300 cities, an outage may only affect specific regions. If a site loads from one location but not another, check which Cloudflare data center is serving each request. The cf-ray header in the HTTP response includes a three-letter airport code identifying the data center.

Common Causes of Cloudflare Outages

Network and Routing Issues

Cloudflare's network relies on BGP routing to direct traffic to the nearest data center. BGP misconfigurations, route leaks from third-party networks, or peering disputes can cause traffic to be routed incorrectly or dropped entirely. These issues can affect specific regions while others remain unaffected.

Software Deployments

Cloudflare deploys code to its global network regularly. A deployment that introduces a bug can cause widespread issues because Cloudflare's edge runs the same software across all data centers. Cloudflare uses staged rollouts to mitigate this risk, but issues sometimes reach production before they are caught.

DNS Resolution Problems

Cloudflare operates one of the largest DNS networks in the world, including the public 1.1.1.1 resolver. Issues with Cloudflare's DNS infrastructure can prevent domains using Cloudflare nameservers from resolving, which makes those websites completely unreachable. DNS outages tend to be the most impactful because there is no fallback when DNS fails.

DDoS Attack Spillover

Cloudflare handles massive DDoS attacks daily. In rare cases, an exceptionally large or unusual attack can stress infrastructure enough to cause collateral impact on other customers sharing the same data center or network segment.

Upstream Provider Issues

Cloudflare depends on transit providers and internet exchange points for connectivity. If a major transit provider has a routing issue or an internet exchange goes down, Cloudflare data centers in the affected region lose connectivity to parts of the internet.

What to Do When Cloudflare Is Down

If You Are a Website Visitor

There is not much you can do except wait. Cloudflare outages are typically resolved within minutes to a few hours. You can try:

• Clearing your DNS cache (ipconfig /flushdns on Windows, sudo dscacheutil -flushcache on macOS)
• Using a different DNS resolver (switch from 1.1.1.1 to 8.8.8.8 temporarily if Cloudflare DNS is the issue)
• Accessing a cached version of the page through Google Cache or the Wayback Machine

If You Are a Website Operator

A Cloudflare outage affecting your site is stressful because the fix depends on Cloudflare, not you. Here is what you can do:

Monitor the status page. Keep cloudflarestatus.com open and subscribe to updates. Cloudflare's engineering team posts detailed updates during incidents.

Communicate with your users. If your site is customer-facing, post a status update on your own channels (Twitter/X, status page, email). Acknowledge the issue and point to Cloudflare's status page.

Consider your architecture. If Cloudflare outages are a recurring concern for your business, evaluate multi-CDN strategies. Running traffic through both Cloudflare and a second CDN provider (using DNS-level failover) reduces the impact of a single provider's outage. This adds complexity and cost, but for high-availability requirements, it may be worth it.

Do not panic-switch DNS. Changing your DNS records during a Cloudflare outage can make things worse. DNS changes take time to propagate, and if Cloudflare recovers before your DNS change propagates globally, you may end up with inconsistent routing for hours.

How to Get Notified About Future Cloudflare Outages

Subscribe to the Cloudflare status page. Cloudflare's status page at cloudflarestatus.com supports email and RSS subscriptions. You can subscribe to all incidents or filter by specific components (DNS, CDN, Workers, etc.).

Use automated monitoring. Is That Down monitors Cloudflare's status page and sends alerts through your preferred channels the moment an incident is posted. Automated monitoring means you hear about issues before your customers start complaining. For a full alerting setup, see our vendor monitoring guide.

Follow @CloudflareHelp on Twitter/X. Cloudflare's support account posts updates during incidents. Turn on notifications for real-time alerts.

Set up synthetic monitoring. Beyond status page monitoring, test your own site's availability through Cloudflare using external monitoring tools. This catches issues that affect your site specifically, even if Cloudflare has not declared a global incident.

Recent Notable Cloudflare Outages

June 2022 Routing Incident

In June 2022, a change to Cloudflare's network configuration caused a significant outage affecting 19 of their data centers, including major locations. The incident lasted roughly 90 minutes and was traced to a BGP configuration change that went wrong during maintenance. Cloudflare published a detailed post-mortem explaining the root cause and the steps they took to prevent recurrence.

February 2023 Service Disruption

In early 2023, Cloudflare experienced an incident that degraded several services including Workers, Pages, and R2 Storage. The issue was caused by a software deployment that interacted badly with a specific traffic pattern. Cloudflare identified and rolled back the change within about an hour, but the incident highlighted how interconnected their services are: a problem in one component can cascade to others.

References

• Cloudflare System Status - Official real-time status for all Cloudflare services.
• Cloudflare Blog - Post-mortems and incident reports.

Beyond vendor monitoring, consider uptime monitoring for your own services and DNS monitoring to catch infrastructure issues that can look like vendor outages.