On 18 November 2025, Cloudflare experienced a major internal service degradation affecting multiple global components, including the dashboard, application services, Cloudflare Access, and WARP. The incident caused elevated error rates and intermittent outages across customer environments for several hours.

Below is a concise breakdown of what happened, followed by a CISO-oriented analysis.

Timeline Summary (UTC)

• 11:48 — Cloudflare reports internal service degradation; multiple services impacted.
• 12:21–12:53 — Partial recovery observed, though error rates remain elevated.
• 13:04 — WARP access disabled in London during remediation.
• 13:09 — Root cause identified; fix being implemented.
• 13:13 — Cloudflare Access and WARP show recovery.
• 13:35–13:58 — Continued restoration work for application services.
• 14:22–14:42 — Fix deployed; dashboard and services recovering.
• 14:57 — Cloudflare confirms most services are restored; monitoring continues.

Impact Overview

Organizations relying on Cloudflare may have experienced:

• Inability to log into the Cloudflare dashboard
• Degraded or failing application services
• Disruption of Zero Trust Access and WARP services
• Connectivity issues for users accessing the Internet through Cloudflare’s network
• Regional disruption (e.g., London)

As of 14:57 UTC, Cloudflare considers the incident mitigated, though monitoring is ongoing.

CISO Analysis: What This Incident Reveals

This outage is a reminder of a fundamental reality:
Even globally distributed, highly redundant cloud networks are not immune to cascading failures.

Key Takeaways for Security and Resilience Programs

1. Zero Trust dependencies must be part of your business continuity plan

When Cloudflare Access and WARP went down, many organizations relying exclusively on Cloudflare Zero Trust temporarily lost access.
A resilient architecture must include:

• Alternative secure access paths (fallback VPN, direct SSO route, on-prem auth)
• Emergency bypass instructions for key staff
• Local fail-open logic where acceptable

2. Cloud governance must recognize “control plane vs. data plane” failures

This outage impacted Cloudflare’s control plane (dashboard, authentication), which can paralyze operations even when the data plane continues functioning.
CISOs should ensure they have:

• Out-of-band management access
• Safe-mode configurations for DNS, firewall, and Access rules
• Local cached policies when identity services fail

3. Global outages test vendor transparency

Cloudflare provided rapid, frequent updates, which is consistent with good operational maturity.
CISOs should ensure that:

• Their SLAs require real-time incident communication
• Status page monitoring is automated
• Vendor incidents trigger internal alerts and SOC playbooks

4. Outages can become security blind spots

During these periods:

• Logs may be incomplete
• Telemetry pipelines may degrade
• Access policies might fail-open or fail-closed unpredictably

Security teams must validate:

• What logs were lost
• If any policies reverted to defaults
• Whether any conditional access rules malfunctioned

5. Dependency concentration increases systemic risk

Cloudflare now sits at the core of Internet routing, DNS, Zero Trust, WAF, CDN and SASE.
The more your environment depends on one vendor, the more your resilience depends on their internal architecture.

Recommended Immediate Actions for CISOs

1. Check your DNS, firewall and Access policies for unintended changes after the outage.
2. Review SOC dashboards for missing logs or gaps.
3. Evaluate whether critical user groups were blocked or left unprotected during the service degradation.
4. Document the business impact (even if minimal) for your next resilience review.
5. Conduct a dependency mapping exercise to understand how Cloudflare outage affects:
   • SASE / SWG flows
   • Remote access
   • Internal app connectivity
   • Identity propagation
6. Update your BCP to include “Cloudflare Infrastructure Outage” as a scenario.

Final Thoughts

Outages like this underscore a vital CISO principle:

Cybersecurity is not only about protection — it is about resilience.
Cloudflare’s rapid response helped stabilize the situation, but every organization should treat today’s events as a resilience stress test.

CISOnode will continue monitoring the aftermath and provide deeper architectural recommendations in the coming days.