What Happened When Cloudflare Went Down The Cloudflare down incident began around 11:20 UTC. Major platforms stopped responding immediately. Users encountered error messages across dozens of websites simultaneously. The company observed unusual traffic spikes around 5:20 AM ET. A bug in the bot protection service triggered cascading failures during routine updates. Traffic routing collapsed across multiple regions. The company deployed fixes around 9:57 AM ET, though some dashboard access issues persisted. Recovery took approximately four hours from initial detection.