The issue began at approximately 17:52 UTC and was primarily caused by a complete failure of Workers KV, Cloudflare’s globally distributed key-value storage system. As a backbone for its serverless computing platform, Workers KV plays a crucial role in supporting configuration, identity management, and content delivery across many of Cloudflare’s offerings. When it went offline, critical functions across the ecosystem were immediately affected.
In a post-incident analysis, Cloudflare revealed that the root cause was a malfunction in the storage infrastructure that underpins Workers KV. This backend is partially hosted by a third-party cloud service, which experienced its own outage—directly leading to the failure of the KV system. The ripple effects were far-reaching, disrupting Cloudflare services for nearly two and a half hours.
Key services impacted included authentication platforms like Access and Gateway, which saw major breakdowns in login systems, session handling, and policy enforcement. Cloudflare’s WARP service was unable to register new devices, while Gateway experienced failures in DNS-over-HTTPS queries. CAPTCHA and login tools such as Turnstile and Challenges also malfunctioned, with a temporary kill switch introducing token reuse risks.
Media services like Stream and Images were hit particularly hard, with all live streaming and media uploads failing during the incident. Other offerings such as Workers AI, Pages, and the AutoRAG AI system were rendered entirely unavailable. Even backend systems like Durable Objects, D1 databases, and Queues registered elevated error rates or became completely unresponsive.
Cloudflare’s response plan now includes a significant architectural shift. The company will begin migrating Workers KV from its current third-party dependency to its in-house R2 object storage solution. This move is designed to reduce reliance on external providers and improve the overall resilience of Cloudflare’s services.
In addition, Cloudflare will implement a series of safeguards to mitigate cascading failures in future outages. This includes new cross-service protections and controlled service restoration tools that will help stabilize systems more gradually and prevent sudden traffic overloads.
While the outage was severe, Cloudflare’s transparency and swift action to redesign its infrastructure aim to minimize similar disruptions in the future and reinforce trust in its platform.
