When Cloudflare goes down, the internet feels it. Today, users across the UK and beyond have been met with broken websites, stalled apps and services refusing to load. It is the second major outage in only a few weeks, and frustration is understandably running high.
So, what is going on?
What Happens When Cloudflare Goes Down?
Cloudflare sits between websites and their visitors. It keeps sites secure, makes them faster and helps handle traffic. Because so many businesses rely on it, even a short outage has a domino effect. When Cloudflare is down, everything connected to its network struggles. Sites time out, dashboards won’t load and transactions fail. For many users, it can look like half the internet has vanished.
Why These Outages Hit Hard
The biggest issue is scale. Cloudflare supports millions of domains, from small blogs to massive online stores and SaaS tools. When a disruption occurs, it isn’t limited to a niche corner of the web. It affects companies across every industry, causing:
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Drops in traffic
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Interrupted sales
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Slow or frozen admin panels
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Loss of user trust
For businesses relying on online activity, even a thirty-minute outage can lead to thousands of pounds in lost revenue.
The Second Outage in Weeks
Two significant disruptions in such a short space of time naturally raises questions. Cloudflare has built its reputation on stability and security, so repeated downtime is unusual. Although Cloudflare is typically transparent and quick to fix issues, the pattern highlights how fragile the internet can feel when one major provider has a hiccup.
While details of today’s incident are still emerging, reports suggest the problem stems from issues within Cloudflare’s network edge, affecting routing and DNS resolution. Until it stabilises fully, intermittent faults may continue for some users.
What Website Owners Can Do
When Cloudflare is down, control is limited, but there are steps that help reduce the impact:
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Monitor uptime with tools not linked to Cloudflare.
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Communicate quickly with customers, especially if you run an ecommerce site.
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Review your backup DNS setup to ensure services can fail over more gracefully.
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Log incidents to assess whether alternative CDN or DNS redundancy might be worth planning.
The Bigger Picture
Outages like this are a reminder of how centralised parts of the internet have become. When a single provider powers such a large percentage of global traffic, any disruption has real-world consequences.
Still, Cloudflare remains one of the most reliable infrastructure companies around. Two outages in quick succession is frustrating, but historically they have shown strong resilience and fast recovery times.
Final Thoughts
With Cloudflare down again, many businesses will be questioning their level of dependency on external infrastructure. As the web grows more interconnected, building redundancy and preparing for unexpected downtime is more important than ever. For now, as Cloudflare stabilises its network, most services should return to normal shortly, but the conversation around resilience will continue.
