The Ripple Effect: How a Cloudflare Failure Disrupted Major Online Services

On June 12, 2025, Cloudflare experienced a major technical glitch that affected many global services such as Discord, Spotify, and Google Maps, making them inaccessible for a short period. Although the outage was temporary, it raised significant questions about the internet’s infrastructure and the extent of its reliance on third-party services.

Cause of the Outage

The outage was caused by a technical failure in Cloudflare’s Workers KV service. A fault in an external cloud service provider disrupted a large portion of Cloudflare’s services. This service was critical for data storage and distribution within Cloudflare’s network, impacting many vital online services.

Affected Services

- Discord

- Spotify

- Google Maps

- Access and WARP

- Turnstile and Workers AI

The glitch caused over 90% of requests related to Workers KV to fail, leading to the disruption of many services dependent on this infrastructure, including video streaming services like Stream and data analytics like Zaraz.

Duration of the Outage and Response

The outage began at 17:52 UTC and was classified as a high-priority incident (P0) after 14 minutes. Cloudflare’s team gradually fixed the issue, with many services restored by 20:28 UTC.

Long-term Impact

Although the fault was due to an external cloud provider, Cloudflare acknowledged responsibility for relying on this provider. The company confirmed plans to accelerate migration to a more resilient internal infrastructure to prevent similar issues in the future.

Lessons Learned

* The importance of diversifying service providers: This incident highlights the risks of relying on a single provider for critical services.

* The necessity of building resilient infrastructure: Transitioning to highly flexible architectures to ensure services aren’t disrupted in the future.

* The extensive interconnection of internet infrastructure: The Cloudflare incident shows how a small problem in one service provider can affect many websites and online services.

Future Steps for Cloudflare

Cloudflare announced plans to accelerate the transition to Cloudflare R2, a more flexible and secure internal solution, alongside strengthening security and autonomy to better handle any future outages.