What Happens When There Are Cloudflare Outages?

Your website is often a client’s first impression, so uptime is critical. When Cloudflare experiences a major outage, it can instantly halt new inquiries, interrupt marketing activity, and weaken trust.

While it’s natural to turn to your hosting provider, outages of this scale usually stem from Cloudflare’s own infrastructure, a key layer in how internet traffic reaches your site. Understanding how these disruptions work and how to protect your website is essential for maintaining your firm’s digital reliability.

What Is Cloudflare and Why Do So Many Websites Depend on It?

Cloudflare isn’t where your site is hosted. It works in front of your server, acting as a buffer that improves security, speed, and overall reliability for countless web services worldwide.

• Security: Shields your site with DDoS protection, bot filtering, and firewalls
• Speed: Uses CDN caching to deliver content from the nearest data center
• Reliability: Handles DNS and load balancing to keep traffic flowing smoothly

This improves load times, protects client data, and stabilizes access to blogs, intake forms, portals, and platforms like WordPress and HubSpot. However, it also means that when Cloudflare fails, your site may appear down even if your server is functioning normally.

What Causes Cloudflare Outages?

Cloudflare is built to handle massive amounts of global internet traffic, but no system is completely immune to problems. As we have seen from past outages, most issues originate within Cloudflare’s services and network, not from hacks or external attacks. A few of the most common triggers include:

• Routing issues: Small routing disruptions can have global effects. 
• Configuration errors: One bad update can quickly cascade through Cloudflare’s network, causing the entire network to experience errors.
• Data center failures: Problems at major facilities can impact entire regions.
• Traffic surges or DDoS-like events: High congestion or DDoS-type traffic can overwhelm routing systems.
• Software bugs: Hidden flaws in large updates can cause widespread outages.

Because Cloudflare’s network is highly automated and interconnected, problems in one area can rapidly ripple across the entire system.

What Actually Happens When Cloudflare Goes Down?

During a large Cloudflare outage, the first visible sign is a surge in 5xx server errors. Here’s why:

When a user visits your site, their request goes through Cloudflare before reaching your hosting server. However, when Cloudflare’s network is experiencing issues, it can’t properly route traffic or serve cached content. Visitors then encounter various 5xx errors, with many seeing the initial 500 error message. Some users were met with a security challenge that failed, displaying “please unblock” messages.

These aren’t hosting problems. As seen today, your server is often functioning normally, and your website itself could be served without errors if it bypasses the Cloudflare layer. The request simply never makes it there. Cloudflare becomes the broken link in the chain, acting as a bad gateway because its own internal systems aren’t communicating with the broader internet. In short, your site isn’t down. Cloudflare is blocking access to it.

How Cloudflare Outages Can Impact Your Business

For law firms, even brief downtime can have serious consequences:

• Lost leads: Visitors can’t reach your contact forms or phone number, causing missed consultation opportunities.
• Reputational harm: A non-loading site can cast doubt on your firm’s professionalism or reliability.
• SEO impact: Googlebot may detect temporary 5xx errors. Short outages usually resolve quickly, but prolonged or repeated errors may cause temporary ranking fluctuations.

While Cloudflare outages are typically resolved quickly by teams working all-hands-on-deck, having safeguards in place helps protect your firm’s lead flow and search performance.

How to Check If a Cloudflare Outage is Happening

The first signs of a Cloudflare outage often come from sudden error reports or staff and client complaints about your site being inaccessible. Before assuming your host is down, check:

• Cloudflare’s status page, which will update with messages like “Cloudflare is aware of and investigating” the issue
• Outage trackers like Downdetector
• Social media for real-time reports
• Your hosting control panel, server logs, and DNS settings

If major platforms like X or ChatGPT are also down and you’re seeing widespread 5xx errors, the issue is likely Cloudflare-related. 

How to Keep Your WordPress Site Accessible During Cloudflare Outages

While you can’t stop Cloudflare outages, you can reduce their impact on your WordPress site by:

• Keeping your hosting environment strong so your site restores instantly after Cloudflare recovers;
• Setting up full-page caching so visitors can still reach key content during disruptions;
• Maintaining access to your DNS settings in case you need to make quick changes; and/or
• Using uptime monitoring to immediately spot whether Cloudflare or your host is the source of the issue.

These measures can significantly reduce downtime and speed up recovery. While that won’t necessarily calm your nerves during an emergency, these certainly are good points to know for preventative measures.

Can You Bypass Cloudflare During an Outage?

Yes, but only with preparation. To bypass Cloudflare, you’d need to:

• Turn off Cloudflare’s proxy by changing the orange cloud to grey in DNS.
• Point DNS straight to your host.
• Have a backup DNS provider in place.

DNS changes don’t take effect right away, so this isn’t a quick mid-outage fix. It’s a safeguard for sites that can’t afford extended downtime.

How Cloudflare Recovers From an Outage (What to Expect)

Cloudflare usually restores service by applying a fix after the issue has been identified and a fix is deployed. This often involves:

• Undoing or repairing the faulty update
• Redirecting traffic away from impacted data centers, such as when they temporarily disabled WARP access in London
• Checking and stabilizing regional performance
• Providing a post-incident report afterward

As services recover, your site becomes accessible immediately, and the team continues to monitor for errors to ensure services are back to normal and all traffic is served successfully.

Best Practices to Protect Your Site From Future Cloudflare Outages

To minimize disruption in future outages:

• Keep your WordPress setup optimized and technically sound.
• Enable Cloudflare’s “Always Online” and aggressive caching features.
• Ensure you control key services like hosting, DNS, and CDN access.
• Use uptime monitoring to spot issues instantly.
• Partner with an agency that understands CDNs, DNS, caching, and emergency response.

With a resilient setup, your site may continue functioning during outages or recover significantly faster when they occur.

Need Help Securing Your WordPress Site? Contact Us Today!

Events like Cloudflare outages show how quickly a third party can interrupt your site, even when everything on your server is working perfectly. If you want a clearer understanding of your current setup or need help preparing for situations like this, our team is ready to support you. Reach out to StateWP for a free audit, and we will walk through the steps needed to keep your WordPress site secure and accessible.