Cloudflare outage on February 20, 2026
Hacker News
February 21, 2026
AI-Generated Deep Dive Summary
Cloudflare experienced a significant service outage on February 20, 2026, due to an unexpected issue with its Bring Your Own IP (BYOIP) service. The problem arose when Cloudflare made changes to how it manages IP addresses for BYOIP customers, causing approximately 1,100 customer prefixes to be withdrawn from the network via Border Gateway Protocol (BGP). This led to some services and applications becoming unreachable for affected users, resulting in timeouts and connection failures. While the incident lasted over six hours, Cloudflare engineers were able to revert the changes and restore most services by 23:03 UTC.
The outage primarily impacted BYOIP customers who rely on Cloudflare’s network to route internet traffic. The issue was not due to a cyberattack but rather an internal configuration change that inadvertently withdrew customer routes from the network. During the peak of the disruption, 25% of BYOIP prefixes were affected, leading to BGP Path Hunting behavior, where end-users’ connections repeatedly attempted to find alternative routes until timeouts occurred. This loop-until-failure scenario disrupted services using BYOIP for internet advertisement.
Cloudflare’s recursive DNS resolver (1.1.1.1) was also temporarily impacted, with users encountering 403 errors and “Edge IP Restricted” messages. Despite the challenges, some customers were able to self-remediate by re-advertising their prefixes through the Cloudflare dashboard, while others required manual intervention from Cloudflare engineers due to a software bug. The company emphasized that the incident was contained before all BYOIP users were affected, as the configuration change was applied iteratively rather than instantaneously.
This outage highlights the critical importance of network reliability and the potential risks of internal changes in large-scale infrastructure. For tech enthusiasts and businesses relying on cloud services, it underscores the need for robust monitoring and redundancy to mitigate such disruptions. Cloudflare has committed to implementing measures to prevent similar incidents, reinforcing its role as a key player in internet security and performance.
The incident serves as a reminder of how even minor configuration changes can have widespread consequences in interconnected systems. For readers interested in tech, this story illustrates the importance of understanding network protocols like BGP and the potential vulnerabilities in cloud-based infrastructure. It also emphasizes the need for transparent communication from service providers during outages to ensure
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Originally published on Hacker News on 2/21/2026