The incident, reported as an “internal service degradation” on a Cloudflare System Status page at 6:48 a.m. Eastern Standard Time, was updated to resolved at 9:42 a.m. EST.
Several state and local agencies posted on social media or their own websites that they were experiencing interruptions. New Jersey Transit reported that parts of its web and mobile services may be “temporarily unavailable or slow to load,” a message that remained on its website at about 12 p.m. EST. The Louisiana Department of Insurance announced on X that the registration deadline for its Louisiana Fortify Homes Program had been extended “due to the national Cloudflare outage on Tuesday.”
Officials in Virginia, Oklahoma and New Mexico IT offices confirmed via email that they were not affected. Virginia uses Cloudflare to protect its email systems, but Communications Director Lindsay LeGrand said no outages to the state technology environment were reported.
“Some users have reported problems with non-Commonwealth of Virginia (COV) websites,” LeGrand said via email. “Cloudflare is reporting that the outage has resolved; the [Virginia IT Agency] VITA team will continue to monitor and share any updates as needed.”
The Michigan Department of Technology, Management and Budget; Georgia Department of Human Services; and Vermont Department of Health also posted alerts.
Local governments reported similar disruptions, including Montgomery County, Md.; Ramsey County, Minn.; and Castleton, Vt. Officials in Olive Branch, Miss., said in a Facebook post that City Hall and the City Court Building would be unable to take in-person payments “due to the nationwide Cloudflare outage,” and advised residents to check for updates throughout the day.
Cloudflare operates one of the world’s largest networks that helps websites and applications stay fast, secure and available, according to its website. Many organizations, including public-sector agencies, use its services to protect against cyber attacks, manage domain name system traffic and ensure critical systems remain accessible to residents. Cloudflare’s core role is to help keep digital services running reliably, even during periods of heavy use or security threats.
After the Cloudflare System Status page reported a fix had been implemented, Chief Technology Officer Dane Knecht posted an update to his LinkedIn account, reporting there was a cascading failure across its network following a routine configuration change, stressing that it was not an attack.
“Transparency about what happened matters, and we plan to share a breakdown with more details in a few hours,” Knecht said. “In short, a latent bug in a service underpinning our bot mitigation capability started to crash after a routine configuration change we made. That cascaded into a broad degradation to our network and other services. This was not an attack.”
