Cloudflare operates one of the world's largest content delivery and internet security networks, spanning over 310 cities across 120 countries. The platform processes an estimated 20% of all web traffic globally, providing DDoS protection, CDN acceleration, DNS resolution, Workers serverless computing, and Zero Trust security. Over 4 million websites and applications rely on Cloudflare's reverse proxy network, making it one of the most critical pieces of internet infrastructure.
Cloudflare outages often result from BGP routing misconfigurations, software deployment rollouts that affect edge nodes globally, or DNS resolution failures at the network layer. Because Cloudflare sits between users and origin servers as a reverse proxy, even minor configuration errors can propagate rapidly across the entire network. Workers platform outages typically stem from V8 isolate scheduling issues or KV storage backend failures.
Cloudflare outages have an outsized impact because the company proxies traffic for millions of websites. When Cloudflare goes down, websites behind it return 502, 520, or 522 errors even though origin servers may be perfectly healthy. DNS outages via Cloudflare's 1.1.1.1 resolver can prevent internet access entirely. During major Cloudflare incidents, even DownDetector itself has gone offline since it relies on Cloudflare for DDoS protection.
Use this page to check Cloudflare's availability. Because Cloudflare proxies traffic for millions of sites, a Cloudflare outage can make it appear that many different websites are down simultaneously. Check cloudflarestatus.com for Cloudflare's official incident updates and affected data center locations.
Error 522 means Cloudflare cannot reach the origin server — this could be a Cloudflare issue or your server being unreachable. Error 502 indicates a bad gateway response. If multiple unrelated websites show these errors simultaneously, Cloudflare itself is likely experiencing an outage rather than individual origin servers being down.
Not all websites — only those using Cloudflare as their CDN or DNS provider. However, since Cloudflare proxies about 20% of all web traffic, outages affect a massive number of sites. Websites using Cloudflare only for DNS (not proxy) may also be impacted if the DNS service specifically is affected.
Cloudflare outages commonly result from BGP routing errors, failed software deployments across their 310+ data centers, or DNS infrastructure issues. In past incidents, a bad regular expression in their WAF rules brought down the entire network. Their distributed architecture means regional outages are more common than global ones.
Set up monitoring with PinusX Uptime Monitor to check your Cloudflare-proxied domains from outside the Cloudflare network. This gives you independent verification of whether your sites are accessible. You can also monitor cloudflarestatus.com directly and configure Slack alerts for instant notifications.
Monitor Cloudflare uptime with PinusX. Get instant alerts when services go down.