Cloudflare outage on February 20, 2026

On February 20, 2026, Cloudflare experienced a significant service outage that affected customers using its Bring Your Own IP (BYOIP) service due to an unintended withdrawal of internet routes caused by a configuration change. The issue, unrelated to any cyberattack, arose from modifications in Cloudflare's network management system that inadvertently removed customer prefixes, leading to widespread connectivity issues and 403 errors on Cloudflare's DNS resolver website. The incident, lasting over six hours, required extensive efforts to restore configurations and re-advertise prefixes. Cloudflare engineers quickly reverted the changes and provided guidance to customers for self-remediation, though some required manual intervention due to a software bug that removed service configurations. This outage highlighted deficiencies in Cloudflare's staging environment and testing processes, leading to a commitment to improve their Addressing API and deploy more controlled and automated configuration changes under their Code Orange: Fail Small initiative. This initiative aims to enhance network resilience by requiring controlled rollouts, removing manual interventions, and establishing better failure mode testing, ensuring such incidents are minimized in the future.