Cloudflare faced a major network outage on Friday, impacting some of the most popular websites and cryptocurrency platforms for around 25 minutes. The disruption affected nearly 28% of HTTP traffic across the network, leaving high-profile sites like X, Canva, and Substack temporarily offline. Cryptocurrency exchanges such as Coinbase and Kraken, as well as several DeFi platforms, also experienced major service interruptions.
The Cause Behind the Outage: A Configuration Glitch
The outage was traced to internal configuration changes made during a security update deployment. Cloudflare clarified that it was not caused by a cyberattack, but rather by a misconfiguration that took place while addressing a vulnerability in React Server Components (CVE-2025-55182). The update increased the HTTP request buffer size, but a mistake in the process disabled a crucial Web Application Firewall testing tool. This led to a Lua runtime error on older FL1 proxy servers, which caused HTTP 500 error responses.
The issue was quickly resolved after Cloudflare reverted the configuration at 09:12 UTC, restoring full service across affected platforms. However, the disruption highlighted the risks of centralized infrastructure, as many platforms and services rely on Cloudflare for network support.
Impact on DeFi and Cryptocurrency Platforms
Several popular decentralized finance (DeFi) platforms like Uniswap, Jupiter, Raydium, and Meteora were also down during the outage, affecting thousands of users. The incident showed how critical it is for major online services and cryptocurrency platforms to diversify their infrastructure to avoid dependence on a single provider.
In response to the disruption, Cloudflare outlined its future plans to improve resilience, including gradual rollouts and additional validation checks during updates. The company also intends to improve its error-handling processes to ensure continued service during failures. Cloudflare’s resiliency report will be released soon, shedding more light on how it plans to prevent such incidents from occurring again.
Decentralization as a Solution to Centralized Vulnerabilities
This outage follows a similar disruption in November 2025, further underscoring the vulnerabilities within centralized networks. The incident has renewed discussions about the advantages of decentralized systems like Filecoin, Arweave, and Akash, which distribute computing resources across independent nodes, making them less prone to single points of failure.