On June 12, 2025, Cloudflare experienced a major service outage that lasted 2 hours and 28 minutes, affecting millions of users worldwide. This comprehensive breakdown explains what happened, which services were impacted, and what Cloudflare is doing to prevent future incidents.
Table of Contents
What Caused the Cloudflare Outage?
The outage was caused by a failure in the underlying storage infrastructure used by Cloudflare’s Workers KV service, which serves as a critical dependency for many Cloudflare products. Part of this infrastructure was backed by a third-party cloud provider, which experienced an outage that directly impacted the availability of Cloudflare’s KV service.
Timeline of the Cloudflare Service Disruption
The incident began at 17:52 UTC when the WARP team noticed device registration failures. The situation escalated quickly as multiple services were affected simultaneously. Services began recovering at 20:23 UTC, with full restoration achieved by 20:28 UTC.
Major Services Affected by Cloudflare Outage
Critical Business Services
- Cloudflare Access: 100% of identity-based logins failed for all application types
- Workers KV: 90.22% of requests failed during the peak impact
- Dashboard: User logins and most existing sessions were unavailable
Developer and Content Services
- Cloudflare Images: 100% failure rate for uploads during peak incident
- Stream: Error rates exceeded 90% as video playlists couldn’t be served
- Workers AI: All inference requests failed for the duration of the incident
- Pages: Error rate peaked to ~100% and all builds could not complete
Security and Network Services
- WARP: New client connections and device registrations were completely blocked
- Gateway: Identity-based DNS queries and proxy connections failed
- Turnstile and Challenges: High failure rates for verification requests
What Services Were NOT Affected?
Importantly, Cloudflare Magic Transit, Magic WAN, DNS, cache, proxy, WAF and related services were not directly impacted. This meant that basic website protection and content delivery continued functioning for most users.
Data Security During the Outage
Cloudflare confirmed that no data was lost as a result of this incident and this was not the result of an attack or other security event.
Cloudflare’s Response and Future Prevention
Cloudflare has outlined several immediate improvements:
Infrastructure Redundancy: The company is accelerating work to improve redundancy within Workers KV’s storage infrastructure, removing dependency on any single provider.
Blast Radius Reduction: Individual products are being made more resilient to prevent cascading failures from single points of failure.
Recovery Tools: New tooling will enable progressive re-enabling of services during future storage incidents.
Impact on Global Internet Infrastructure
This outage highlighted the interconnected nature of modern internet services. Many of Cloudflare’s products are built to rely on the Workers KV service, which amplified the impact when the core storage infrastructure failed.
The incident serves as a reminder of how critical reliable infrastructure providers are to the modern internet ecosystem, affecting everything from website access to enterprise security systems worldwide.
