Cloudflare glitch during routine maintenance briefly disrupts global web traffic

Cloudflare’s routine maintenance spiraled into an unexpected outage on Friday, briefly knocking its dashboard, API, and some major websites offline. The disruption began during scheduled work in Chicago and spread just before Detroit’s maintenance window. Services recovered within about 30 minutes, though Cloudflare later confirmed additional issues affecting Workers. The company attributed the incident to a faulty Web Application Firewall update deployed while addressing a newly disclosed industry vulnerability.