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On February 20, 2026, a faulty change in Cloudflare’s Bring Your Own IP (BYOIP) workflow caused the company to withdraw some customers’ IP address prefixes from internet routing. Services that relied on those routes became unreachable or timed out. Cloudflare says the incident was not caused by an attack; it reverted the change and restored the affected configurations over 6 hours and 7 minutes.
What caused the Cloudflare outage?
The incident began with an automated change to Cloudflare’s Addressing API, the authoritative record of the IP addresses configured on its network. As part of its “Code Orange: Fail Small” work, Cloudflare was automating customer requests to remove BYOIP prefixes—work that had previously been handled manually.
A recurring cleanup subtask queried the API incorrectly. The resulting change unintentionally removed some customer prefix configurations and withdrew their BGP advertisements. BGP, or Border Gateway Protocol, is how networks tell one another which IP address ranges they can reach. When Cloudflare stopped advertising an affected range, networks could no longer reliably find a route to services using it; some connections tried alternative paths before timing out.
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Scan for outdated or missing drivers - takes under a minuteDriver Scan →Repair Windows errors before they cause bigger problemsFix Now →Cloudflare’s postmortem says the issue was not caused, directly or indirectly, by a cyberattack or malicious activity. The company described the impact as “unacceptably large” and apologized to customers. Cloudflare’s February 20, 2026 outage postmortem
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When did it happen, and how large was the impact?
The outage began at 17:48 UTC on February 20, 2026. Cloudflare reports that roughly 1,100 prefixes were withdrawn between 17:56 and 18:46 UTC. Those were 25% of the 4,306 BYOIP prefixes Cloudflare advertised globally.
That percentage refers to IP prefixes, not customers, websites, traffic, or individual users. Cloudflare’s postmortem does not give a verified count of people affected. The rollout was iterative, and Cloudflare reverted the change before it reached every BYOIP customer, so the incident affected a subset rather than all customers using the service.
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Who and what was affected?
Impacts were concentrated on services relying on the withdrawn BYOIP routes. Cloudflare reported effects on:
- Core CDN and security services using the affected address ranges.
- Spectrum applications using BYOIP.
- Dedicated Egress configurations using BYOIP.
- Magic Transit applications relying on the affected prefixes.
Visitors trying to use the one.one.one.one resolver website saw HTTP 403 errors and an “Edge IP Restricted” message. However, DNS resolution through the 1.1.1.1 Public Resolver—including DNS over HTTPS—was not affected. The resolver website and the DNS resolution service are distinct parts of the experience.
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ITPro reported Uber, Workday, Minecraft, Wikipedia, and Microsoft Outlook among websites affected during the incident. These are examples from secondary reporting, not a complete list; the report does not establish that every user of each service experienced the same failure. ITPro’s February 23, 2026 report
How did Cloudflare resolve the outage?
Cloudflare reverted the faulty change after failures were observed. Some customers were able to restore service themselves by re-advertising their prefixes in the dashboard. Cloudflare restored many advertisement changes at about 20:20 UTC.
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About 300 prefixes needed additional work because their service configurations had been removed from edge servers and could not be restored through the dashboard. Engineers restored those configurations manually at 23:03 UTC. Cloudflare gives the total incident duration as 6 hours and 7 minutes, with most of that time spent restoring prefix configurations.
What is Cloudflare changing to reduce the risk of a repeat?
Cloudflare said it was improving how the Addressing API handles configuration changes, including staged testing and correctness checks. The company framed this work as part of its controlled-rollout and “Fail Small” effort. These are prevention steps Cloudflare described in its postmortem; the statement does not establish that every change was later completed or that recurrence risk has been eliminated.
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