Cloudflare has “fully resolved” an outage some commentators are already characterising as its “CrowdStrike moment”.
The internet security outfit’s services today experienced a “significant outage”, bringing vast swathes of the internet – including the Good Ship IT Channel Oxygen itself – to its knees.
In a statement to IT Channel Oxygen, a Cloudflare representative said the outage was “fully resolved at 14.30 UTC”, revealing that a configuration file as the root cause (see full statement, bottom). It also apologised.
The incident comes just weeks after outages at AWS and Azure brought chunks of the internet to a standstill, and 16 months after the CrowdStrike-induced Windows meltdown.
Talking recently to IT Channel Oxygen, CrowdStrike Chief Business Officer Daniel Bernard claimed the July 2024 incident has “made us a stronger company”. Having fallen 40% in the aftermath of the outage, CrowdStrike’s shares are now trading at close to their highest level.
The potential parallel with Cloudflare was not lost on Alex Smith, VP of Channels at analyst firm Futurum Group, who spotted “silver linings” in today’s incident.
“Cloudflare having its CrowdStrike moment where one of the outcomes will be people saying, “wow, lots of companies use Cloudflare,” Smith wrote in a LinkedIn post.
Listed on the NYSE, Cloudflare enjoyed an “excellent” Q3 of 2025 as revenues leapt 31% year on year to $562m. UK distribution partner e92plus recently highlighted it as one of its fastest-growing vendors.
For some, the incident is being interpreted as further evidence that the internet is concentrated in the hands of too few global players.
“Today’s Cloudflare outage is another reminder that too much of the UK’s digital infrastructure still depends on a handful of global platforms,” stated Stewart Laing, CEO at Asanti Data Centres.
Talking to IT Channel Oxygen, Graham Cluley, host of the Smashing Security and The AI Fix podcasts, said it was “great to hear” that Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince had apologised and described what happened as ‘unacceptable’.
“After all, thousands of websites were inaccessible due to the Cloudflare screw-up, and presumably that would have caused some of them to lose significant revenue and some disgruntled customers may have thought it was the websites’ fault rather than Cloudflare,” he said.
“But as my aunt used to say, ‘kind words don’t butter parsnips’. Will Cloudflare compensate those businesses who lost out through no fault of their own? My presumption that they won’t do anything of the kind.”
In a statement, Cloudflare said:
Cloudflare’s services experienced a significant outage today beginning around 10:20 UTC. It was fully resolved at 14:30 UTC. The root cause of the outage was a configuration file that is automatically generated to manage threat traffic. The file grew beyond an expected size of entries and triggered a crash in the software system that handles traffic for a number of Cloudflare’s services.
To be clear, there is no evidence that this was the result of an attack or caused by malicious activity. We expect that some Cloudflare services will be briefly degraded as traffic naturally spikes post incident but we expect all services to return to normal in the next few hours. A detailed explanation will be posted soon on blog.cloudflare.com. Given the importance of Cloudflare’s services, any outage is unacceptable. We apologise to our customers and the Internet in general for letting you down today. We will learn from today’s incident and improve.
