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Cloudflare outage on November 18, 2025

blog.cloudflare.com · 2,963 words · saved by 1 readers

On 18 November 2025 at 11:20 UTC (all times in this blog are UTC), Cloudflare's network began experiencing significant failures to deliver core network traffic. This showed up to Internet users trying to access our customers' sites as an error page indicating a failure within Cloudflare's network. The issue was not caused, directly or indirectly, by a cyber attack or malicious activity of any kind. Instead, it was triggered by a change to one of our database systems' permissions which caused the database to output multiple entries into a “feature file” used by our Bot Management system. That feature file, in turn, doubled in size. The larger-than-expected feature file was then propagated to all the machines that make up our network. The software running on these machines to route traffic across our network reads this feature file to keep our Bot Management system up to date with ever changing threats. The software had a limit on the size of the feature file that was below its doubled s

On 18 November 2025 at 11:20 UTC (all times in this blog are UTC), Cloudflare's network began experiencing significant failures to deliver core network traffic. This showed up to Internet users trying to access our customers' sites as an error page indicating a failure within Cloudflare's network. The issue was not caused, directly or indirectly, by a cyber attack or malicious activity of any kind. Instead, it was triggered by a change to one of our database systems' permissions which caused the database to output multiple entries into a “feature file” used by our Bot Management system. That f

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