Current Status: Intermittent Connectivity Issues

Update timeline

1. investigating Nov 18, 2025, 11:49 AM UTC

   Current Status: Intermittent Connectivity Issues We are currently experiencing intermittent connectivity problems affecting some customers. The issue has been traced to an upstream Cloudflare service disruption. Our team is monitoring the situation closely and working to minimise any impact. We will provide further updates as Cloudflare restores normal service. Thank you for your patience.

2. investigating Nov 18, 2025, 12:22 PM UTC

   Cloudflare is aware of, and investigating an issue which impacts multiple customers: Widespread 500 errors. We are working to understand the full impact and mitigate this problem. More updates to follow shortly.

3. monitoring Nov 18, 2025, 12:28 PM UTC

   We are seeing services recover, but customers may continue to observe higher-than-normal error rates as we continue remediation efforts.

4. monitoring Nov 18, 2025, 01:50 PM UTC

   Cloudflare are continuing to work on restoring service for application services customers.

5. monitoring Nov 18, 2025, 02:28 PM UTC

   Cloudflare are continuing to work on a fix for this issue.

6. monitoring Nov 18, 2025, 02:48 PM UTC

   Cloudflare update: A fix has been implemented and we believe the incident is now resolved. We are continuing to monitor for errors to ensure all services are back to normal.

7. monitoring Nov 18, 2025, 03:54 PM UTC

   Cloudflare are continuing to focus on restoring service post-fix. They are mitigating several issues that remain post-deployment.

8. monitoring Nov 18, 2025, 04:15 PM UTC

   Cloudflare update: Bot scores will be impacted intermittently while we undergo global recovery. We will update once we believe bot scores are fully recovered.

9. monitoring Nov 18, 2025, 04:41 PM UTC

   Cloudflare continue to see errors and latency improve but still have reports of intermittent errors. The team continues to monitor the situation as it improves, and looking for ways to accelerate full recovery.

10. monitoring Nov 18, 2025, 05:20 PM UTC

    Cloudflare continue to monitor the system through recovery and are seeing errors and latency return to normal levels. A full post-incident investigation and details about the incident will be made available asap. Patsy

11. monitoring Nov 18, 2025, 07:07 PM UTC

    Cloudflare services are currently operating normally. We are no longer observing elevated errors or latency across the network. Our engineering teams continue to closely monitor the platform and perform a deeper investigation into the earlier disruption, but no configuration changes are being made at this time. At this point, it is considered safe to re-enable any Cloudflare services that were temporarily disabled during the incident. We will provide a final update once our investigation is complete.

12. resolved Nov 18, 2025, 07:07 PM UTC

    This incident has been resolved.

13. postmortem Nov 19, 2025, 09:44 AM UTC

    ## **Incident overview** On 18 November 2025, Cloudflare experienced a global service disruption that caused HTTP 500 errors before traffic reached our infrastructure. During this period, visitors to your website may have seen Cloudflare’s error page instead of reaching the hosted origin. Your hosting platform remained stable. The issue occurred entirely within Cloudflare’s network, and normal service was restored once Cloudflare completed its fixes. The outage began at 11:20 UTC, core traffic stabilised at 14:30 UTC, and all Cloudflare systems were fully restored by 17:06 UTC. ## **Root cause** The incident was triggered by an internal Cloudflare configuration error. A database permissions change caused Cloudflare’s Bot Management system to generate a malformed configuration file. This file doubled in size and exceeded a strict memory limit inside Cloudflare’s global proxy layer. When deployed across their network, the proxy failed and returned HTTP 500 responses to end users. There was no attack, DDoS, or malicious activity involved. ## **Incident response** Cloudflare’s engineering teams moved quickly once error rates spiked: * They investigated the surge in 500 errors and initially suspected a large-scale DDoS due to unusual traffic behaviour. * They traced the issue to the malformed Bot Management feature file. * They stopped propagation of the incorrect file and replaced it with a stable version. * They restarted affected proxy services globally to restore normal traffic flow. Our platform remained fully operational throughout the incident. The issue was entirely upstream at Cloudflare, which prevented traffic from reaching our environment. Because access is secured through Cloudflare, the origin couldn’t be reached until Cloudflare restored normal service. ## **Mitigation steps** ### **Immediate actions** Cloudflare applied several emergency measures to stabilise traffic: * Halted generation and distribution of the malformed configuration file. * Deployed a known-good version across all global edge locations. * Restarted core proxy systems to clear the failure state. * Implemented temporary bypasses for dependent services to reduce secondary impact. ### **Long-term prevention** Cloudflare has begun work on permanent improvements, including: * Strengthening validation for all internally generated configuration files. * Adding additional global kill switches for safety-critical components. * Improving memory-handling and error-recovery logic within their proxy modules. * Enhancing database query controls to prevent malformed output. * Reviewing failure modes across Bot Management and other proxy-related systems. ## **Conclusion** This outage was caused entirely by a configuration failure within Cloudflare’s Bot Management system. Your website hosting, infrastructure, and the Happydance platform remained stable and were not the source of the interruption. Cloudflare resolved the issue the same afternoon and has committed to platform-wide improvements to prevent recurrence. We’ll continue to monitor Cloudflare’s remediation progress and ensure your environment stays protected. If you’d like help sharing this internally or need further clarification, we’re here to support you. ## **Reference** Full technical summary from Cloudflare: [**https://blog.cloudflare.com/18-november-2025-outage/**](https://blog.cloudflare.com/18-november-2025-outage/)