Cloudflare Outage on October 23, 2026: Connectivity Issues Across North America
Cloudflare reported a major incident from 15:47 to 18:43 UTC on October 23, 2026, caused by a connectivity provider outage that degraded traffic in North America.
2h 56m
length of the incident, from first update to resolution
15:47 UTC
when Cloudflare began investigating
18:43 UTC
when Cloudflare marked the incident resolved
8
status updates Cloudflare posted during the incident
What happened
Cloudflare reported an incident affecting its network in North America from 15:47 to 18:43 UTC on October 23, 2026. Cloudflare rated the impact as major. Its status updates say a connectivity provider outage caused network congestion, which degraded performance for some customers in the region.
Timeline, as Cloudflare reported it
- 15:47 UTC: Cloudflare began investigating degraded performance on some traffic between its Ashburn and Atlanta data centers. Customers could see higher latency, packet loss, or intermittent errors on Workers and other services in the Eastern US.
- 16:07 UTC: Cloudflare identified a connectivity provider outage and began rerouting traffic away from the affected paths.
- 16:27 UTC: A fix was implemented and the team began monitoring the results.
- 17:03 UTC: The provider's failure recurred, and Cloudflare continued traffic management to work around it.
- 18:18 UTC: Traffic was rerouted around the affected paths, and packet drops had stopped. The provider reported its service restored, but some links were still coming back, so Cloudflare kept its traffic changes in place.
- 18:43 UTC: Cloudflare marked the incident resolved.
Why a network problem like this reaches many sites
Cloudflare sits between many websites and their visitors, and it carries traffic for customers' applications and APIs as well. When the paths between its data centers degrade, traffic routed through them can slow down or fail, even when a customer's own servers are running normally. That is how one provider's problem can show up as errors on sites with no direct connection to it.
Same-day reports from other services
On October 23, Downdetector also showed a spike in US reports for several services, including Canva, ChatGPT, Reddit, Zoom, Microsoft 365, Discord and Cloudflare. Downdetector says its reports show where people are complaining, and they do not establish that services share a cause. We could link the Cloudflare incident to an official status record. We did not establish a cause for the other spikes.
What is not confirmed. Cloudflare's updates do not name the connectivity provider, and they do not say how many customers were affected or how many requests failed. We did not find a published count.
If a site you use showed errors that day
- Check the provider's status page first. Cloudflare publishes its status at cloudflarestatus.com.
- Retry after the incident ended. This incident was resolved within about three hours, so a retry after 18:43 UTC would have ruled it out.
For background on common causes of internet disruptions, see the internet outage guide.
Sources: Cloudflare status updates for the incident "Network connectivity issues affecting services in North America," October 23, 2026, as recorded by Host-Tracker (host-tracker.com); Downdetector reports as summarized by NerdsMagazine (October 23, 2026).