Cloudflare Down? Users Report Access Issues As Internet Infrastructure Giant Faces New Disruption Thursday

UPDATE From CloudFLare: “Cloudflare is not experiencing any significant service disruptions at this time. Our services are operating normally, and any reporting that deviates from this is incorrect” (11:58 AM Thursday, September 3, 2026 Eastern Time (ET)

Users began reporting access problems tied to Cloudflare, the internet infrastructure and security company that powers a significant portion of the global web, starting around 11:12 a.m. EDT Thursday, according to outage-tracking site Downdetector.

The outage tracker’s official account flagged the surge in user complaints shortly after the reports began, asking affected users how the disruption was impacting them and directing people to its live outage dashboard for further updates. The hashtag “CloudflareDown” began circulating on social media as users compared notes on the issue.

Cloudflare, which provides content delivery, network security and performance services for websites across the internet, has experienced a documented pattern of intermittent issues over the past several days, according to independent status-tracking services. StatusGator’s monitoring data shows Cloudflare’s overall status has registered a “warning” condition, indicating degraded rather than fully unavailable service, continuously across much of the past two weeks, with periods ranging from several hours to nearly a full day at a stretch. That same tracker recorded a brief, fully “down” incident lasting 19 minutes on Sept. 1, along with a separate documented incident early Thursday morning, at 1:55 a.m., described as an “HTTP/3 issue affecting R2 custom domains,” which lasted approximately one minute.

Other independent monitoring services have painted a similarly turbulent picture of Cloudflare’s recent reliability. One tracker, IncidentHub, reported that Cloudflare had recorded 76 separate outages across 49 different components over the trailing 30-day period, with specific services including its R2 object storage product and WARP VPN service flagged as affected in recent status checks, even as other Cloudflare offerings, including its AI Gateway and AI Search products, continued showing as operational.

Because Cloudflare provides infrastructure services to an estimated 20% of websites globally, according to industry estimates, disruptions affecting the company’s network have historically produced outsized, highly visible ripple effects across the broader internet, often taking down or degrading access to major platforms that rely on Cloudflare for content delivery, security filtering or domain name resolution services.

Cloudflare has experienced several major, high-profile outages over the past year that illustrate the scale of disruption the company’s infrastructure problems can cause. In November 2025, a significant outage affecting Cloudflare’s core network took down or degraded access to a wide range of major websites and platforms, including social media platform X, artificial intelligence company OpenAI’s services, and music streaming service Spotify. Cloudflare later published a detailed internal account of that incident, describing the resulting downtime as unacceptable given the company’s central role in the internet’s infrastructure.

“We are sorry for the impact to our customers and to the Internet in general,” Cloudflare wrote in its public postmortem addressing the November incident. “Given Cloudflare’s importance in the Internet ecosystem any outage of any of our systems is unacceptable. That there was a period of time where our network was not able to route traffic is deeply painful to every member of our team.”

Cloudflare’s account of the November outage traced the root cause to a software issue in which the company’s systems began loading an incorrect internal feature file, triggering a spike in server error responses across its network. The company said other systems dependent on its core proxy infrastructure, including its Workers KV data storage product and Cloudflare Access authentication service, were also affected during that incident, with engineers ultimately implementing a patch to bypass the core proxy for Workers KV in order to reduce the broader impact.

Just weeks later, in December 2025, Cloudflare experienced another significant disruption, which the company again publicly acknowledged with a similarly apologetic tone in its subsequent incident report.

“Any outage of our systems is unacceptable, and we know we have let the Internet down again following the incident on November 18,” Cloudflare wrote regarding the December incident, which the company traced to changes made to its Web Application Firewall buffer size settings as part of an unrelated security effort to protect customers from a critical vulnerability affecting React-based applications.

A separate major incident in February 2026 affected customers using Cloudflare’s Bring Your Own IP service, a feature that allows customers to route their own internet address blocks through Cloudflare’s network. During that incident, a configuration change unintentionally caused a portion of customer IP address routes to be withdrawn from the internet’s global routing tables, rendering affected customer websites and applications unreachable for several hours. Cloudflare said that incident was not caused by any cyberattack or malicious activity, but rather stemmed from an internal change to how the company managed IP addresses onboarded through its Bring Your Own IP pipeline.

As of Thursday morning, it remained unclear whether the reports beginning at 11:12 a.m. EDT were connected to any of the previously logged incidents affecting Cloudflare’s infrastructure this week, or represented a separate, newly emerging disruption. Cloudflare had not issued a specific public statement addressing the cause of Thursday’s reported access issues as of the time affected users began flagging problems on social media.

For website owners and businesses that rely on Cloudflare for their online infrastructure, standard guidance during a suspected outage typically involves first confirming whether the underlying issue originates with Cloudflare itself or with a customer’s own origin server, by checking Cloudflare’s official status page for any acknowledged incidents. If Cloudflare’s status page shows all systems operational despite continued site inaccessibility, the underlying problem more likely lies with a customer’s own hosting provider rather than with Cloudflare’s network directly. In situations where Cloudflare’s infrastructure is confirmed to be the source of a disruption, affected website operators can sometimes mitigate the impact by temporarily enabling Development Mode within their Cloudflare dashboard or by pausing Cloudflare services entirely, routing traffic directly to their origin servers instead.

As of Thursday late morning, it remained unclear how long the newly reported access issues would persist or how broadly they might affect websites and services relying on Cloudflare’s infrastructure. Affected users were advised to monitor both Downdetector’s live outage dashboard and Cloudflare’s official status page for updates as the company worked to identify and address the underlying cause of the disruption.