If your website, apps, or online services rely on the internet, then you depend on infrastructure providers like Cloudflare. When they experience major service disruptions, the impact can reach far and wide, affecting your business operations, customer access, and digital reputation. At TechGN, we believe every business, especially small and medium‑sized (SMB), should understand what can go wrong, why, and how to be ready.
In this guide, we’ll dig into why Cloudflare outages happen, the common causes, the business risks they create, and the practical steps you can take to reduce your exposure and respond effectively when incidents occur.
Why Cloudflare Matters to Your Business
Cloudflare is a major internet infrastructure company that provides content delivery network (CDN) services, web application firewalls (WAFs), DNS resolution, DDoS mitigation, and much more. According to internet monitoring sources, Cloudflare supports around 20% of all websites globally.
Because it sits between many websites/apps and their users, any failure or problem at Cloudflare can cascade, and many downstream services become unavailable or degraded. Understanding how this happens helps you build resilience.
Recent Examples of Outages and What They Teach Us
Example 1: June 12, 2025, Workers KV Storage Failure
Cloudflare explained that this outage was caused by a failure in the underlying storage infrastructure used by their “Workers KV” service, a key dependency for many of their services.
Example 2: July 14, 2025, DNS/Configuration Error
A configuration error on a legacy system remained dormant and was triggered by another change on July 14, causing a global outage.
Example 3: November 18, 2025, Major Service Disruption
On this date, many websites and services, such as ChatGPT, X (formerly Twitter), and others, were disrupted due to a Cloudflare internal degradation: a configuration file that “grew beyond an expected size of entries and triggered a crash” in threat‑traffic software. These incidents show a few patterns:
- Failure often lies in internal changes, misconfigurations, or dependencies rather than external cyberattacks.
- Infrastructure complexity (global CDNs, many services, many dependencies) increases risk.
- Even if the core service remains intact, ancillary services (dashboard access, API, monitoring) may fail.
- Business impact can be enormous: customers can’t reach your website, users can’t authenticate, and vices stall.
Common Causes of Cloudflare‑Type Infrastructure Failures
Let’s break down typical causes of outages you should understand:
1. Configuration Errors and Legacy Systems
As seen in July 2025, a configuration change triggered an unexpected bug in a legacy system. Legacy systems and hidden dependencies pose a risk because they may operate without full visibility or modern testing.
2. Storage or Dependency Failures
For example, the Workers KV outage in June 2025 stemmed from a third‑party provider’s storage failure that impacted Cloudflare’s service. When you rely on a service provider, you’re also relying on their dependencies.
3. Traffic Spikes & Bot or Threat Traffic
Infrastructure has to handle normal operations and large spikes, whether from legitimate usage or malicious actor activity. The November 2025 outage referenced a middleware service managing threat traffic.
4. DNS or Routing Layer Problems
Misadvertised IP addresses or BGP (Border Gateway Protocol) routing errors can cause massive reachability loss.
5. DDoS or Cyber‑Attack Pressure
Although not always the cause, a provider like Cloudflare is often defending large-scale attacks. For example, Cloudflare reported blocking records‑breaking DDoS peaks. When a provider is overwhelmed, services can degrade.
6. Software Bugs, Platform Upgrades & Human Error
Every service update or config change carries risk. For example, in the July 2025 case, the faulty configuration remained dormant until triggered. Human error or inadequate change management plays a big part.
What It Means for Your Business
When a service provider like Cloudflare suffers an outage, your business could experience:
- Website downtime or performance slowdowns
- Application failures or API errors
- Loss of customer trust or brand damage
- Lost revenue if e‑commerce or subscription services are impacted
- Internal workflow disruption (remote login, SaaS apps, etc.)
- Increased risk exposure if your failover plan isn’t ready
As your websites, apps, cloud services, and even internal tools rely on multiple layers of infrastructure, you must assume provider risk and plan accordingly.
How to Prepare Your Business for Infrastructure Failures
Here are practical steps your business, especially SMBs can take to prepare, reduce risk, and respond when things go wrong.
Step 1: Map Your Service Dependencies
- Identify all external services your business uses: CDNs (like Cloudflare), DNS providers, APIs, and SaaS tools.
- Understand which of your services rely on Cloudflare (or similar).
- Ask your procurement/IT team which vendors host what and which ones, if they fail, would have the biggest impact.
Step 2: Build Redundancy and Failover Plans
- Use multiple vendors when possible (e.g., alternate CDN or DNS) to avoid single-point failures.
- Create failover workflows: what happens if the CDN fails? redirect traffic, use an alternate domain or mirror site.
- Ensure you can still operate internally or externally even when a major provider is down.
Step 3: Monitor & Alert Proactively
- Use monitoring tools that check not just your website, but your entire access chain (CDN, DNS, firewall).
- Set alerts for elevated error rates (500 errors, timeouts).
- Ensure you have visibility into your provider status (Cloudflare status page, service‑level updates) and that you’re subscribed to notifications.
Step 4: Change Management and Configuration Control
- Treat every change (configuration, update, new feature) as a potential risk.
- Use test environments, change approval, and rollback plans.
- Document your configuration and dependencies so you can troubleshoot quickly.
Step 5: Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity
- Regularly back up critical assets and data so you’re not stuck if service fails.
- Create an incident playbook: who is notified, what communication goes out to customers, and what actions start internally.
- Practice restoration: simulate failure of key service (e.g., CDN) and see how your team reacts.
Step 6: Review Your SLAs and Contracts
- Understand your vendor’s service‑level agreement (SLA). What compensation do you have if they fail?
- Make sure your contract allows you to shift vendors or use alternate paths if the provider fails.
- Consider your risk exposure: if your business depends heavily on provider X, you may need a higher mitigation budget.
Step 7: Security Implications
Even when a provider failure is not a cyberattack, it can be a security risk if you can’t access logging, monitoring, or alerts.
- Ensure you have offline access to logs and audit trails.
- Use least‑privilege and multi‑factor authentication (MFA) even for vendor portals.
- Make sure you know how to respond if access to key services (DNS, CDN) is lost.
Case Study: What Happened on November 18, 2025
The outage at Cloudflare on November 18, 2025, caused services like ChatGPT, X, and many others to become unavailable.
Cloudflare explained that a configuration file used to manage threat traffic grew too large and triggered a crash in the software system handling traffic. While no malicious activity was found, it highlighted how even non‑malicious internal changes can cause global impact.
What can you learn?
- Providers can be disrupted by internal bugs.
- Your business needs alternate paths.
- Transparency and vendor communication matter.
- You should assume dependencies will fail eventually and plan for it now.
How TechGN Can Help You Stay Ready
At TechGN, we support SMBs by offering:
- Infrastructure risk assessments (which vendors you depend on and how resilient you are)
- Multi‑vendor architecture design (CDN, DNS, CDN failover)
- Monitoring and alerting setup, with custom dashboards and downtime workflows
- Change management practices and incident playbooks tailored to your business
- Vendor contract reviews and SLA checks to ensure your terms protect you
We believe in turning tech risk into a manageable strategy, so your business stays resilient when infrastructure fails.
Want to Get Started?
Contact TechGN today for a free infrastructure resilience assessment. Let’s check your dependencies, build your failover strategy, and ensure you’re ready for whatever the cloud, and the internet throws at you.
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