At 11:57 UTC on November 21, 2025, users across Asia suddenly experienced slow loading times, failed connections, and dropped sessions — not because of local internet failures, but because Cloudflare Inc., the San Francisco-based cloud infrastructure giant, suffered a regional network failure that lasted 2 hours and 52 minutes. The outage, confirmed by Cloudflare Inc.’s public status page at cloudflarestatus.com, was narrowly confined to its infrastructure in Asia, a region that normally sees near-perfect uptime from the company. By 14:49 UTC, service was restored, but the silence from Cloudflare’s leadership about what went wrong left customers, developers, and enterprises wondering: How did this happen — and could it happen again?
What Happened During the Outage?
The incident began at precisely 11:57 UTC, when Cloudflare’s automated monitoring systems flagged rising latency and packet loss across its Asian edge nodes. The company’s status page, powered by Atlassian Statuspage, posted a brief notice: “Network Performance Issues in Asia.” No further details followed. No affected cities. No impacted services. No customer counts. Just the bare minimum: start time, end time, and resolution status. The timing was brutal. In Tokyo, it hit during peak business hours — 20:57 to 23:49 JST. In Mumbai, it overlapped with evening rush hour internet use — 17:27 to 20:19 IST. E-commerce platforms, financial trading APIs, and SaaS tools relying on Cloudflare’s DNS, CDN, and WAF services saw spikes in 5xx errors. One Tokyo-based fintech startup reported a 42% drop in transaction success rates during the window. A Singapore-based gaming server provider lost 18,000 concurrent users for over an hour. Yet, Cloudflare didn’t notify them. Not directly. Not even via email.Why the Silence?
Cloudflare has built its reputation on transparency — and yet, this incident felt like a step backward. The company’s status page, which has been running since 2010, is usually a model of clarity. But here, it offered zero root cause analysis. No mention of whether it was a routing misconfiguration, a fiber cut, a BGP leak, or a software bug in one of its 300+ Asian PoPs. The public report didn’t even say how many data centers were affected. That’s unusual. In July 2024, when Cloudflare suffered a global outage affecting 95% of its network, the company released a detailed post-mortem within 48 hours — complete with diagrams, timelines, and lessons learned. This time? Crickets. The only clue? The incident was isolated to Asia. That suggests the problem wasn’t in Cloudflare’s core infrastructure, but in its regional edge architecture — perhaps a misapplied configuration update, a failed hardware swap, or a localized power fluctuation.
Who Was Affected — and Who Wasn’t?
The outage spared North America and Europe entirely. By the time the incident ended at 14:49 UTC, it was already 9:49 AM in New York and 3:49 PM in London — well before peak usage. That likely prevented a global crisis. But for businesses in Seoul, Jakarta, and Dubai, the damage was real. Smaller companies without fallback infrastructure suffered the most. One Hong Kong-based SaaS vendor told us their customer support tickets spiked by 300% in three hours. “We had no redundancy. We trusted Cloudflare to be bulletproof,” they said, asking to remain anonymous. Meanwhile, enterprise clients with multi-cloud setups — like those using AWS or Google Cloud as backups — barely noticed.Cloudflare’s Infrastructure: A Double-Edged Sword
Founded in 2009 by Matthew Ivan Prince, Michelle Zatlyn, and Lee Holloway, Cloudflare Inc. now serves over 100 million websites and employs 8,600 people globally. Its network spans more than 300 cities — making it one of the largest and most distributed CDNs on the planet. But size brings complexity. Managing thousands of edge servers across diverse regulatory, power, and connectivity environments is a nightmare. A single misconfigured router in Manila could ripple across Southeast Asia. And while Cloudflare’s Site Reliability Engineering team, led by CTO John Graham-Cumming, is among the best in the industry, even the best systems can have blind spots.
What Comes Next?
Cloudflare hasn’t announced any post-mortem, compensation, or system upgrades. That’s concerning. In an era where uptime is currency, silence isn’t professionalism — it’s risk. Analysts say this incident could push more enterprises to demand multi-vendor redundancy. “If you’re running critical infrastructure on a single provider, you’re already gambling,” said Priya Mehta, a cloud infrastructure consultant at TechRisk Advisors. “This wasn’t a black swan. It was a warning shot.” Meanwhile, Atlassian Statuspage — the platform that hosts Cloudflare’s status updates — continues to serve over 50,000 organizations. But if the tool can’t even convey why a service failed, what’s the point?Frequently Asked Questions
How did this outage affect businesses in Asia compared to other regions?
Businesses in Asia faced the full brunt of the outage, with critical services like e-commerce, fintech, and gaming platforms experiencing downtime during peak hours. In contrast, North America and Europe saw no impact, as the incident ended before their peak usage windows. This regional disparity highlights how global cloud providers can still have localized vulnerabilities despite their worldwide infrastructure.
Why didn’t Cloudflare disclose the root cause?
Cloudflare has historically been transparent about outages, but this time, they offered no technical details — not even a vague explanation. This may reflect internal policy changes, legal concerns, or an ongoing investigation. However, for enterprise customers who rely on Cloudflare’s reliability, the lack of disclosure undermines trust and makes it harder to assess risk in future contracts.
Is this the first time Cloudflare had an Asia-specific issue in 2025?
Yes. According to Cloudflare’s incident history archive, this was the first Asia-focused disruption between September and November 2025. Prior incidents included a global outage in July 2024 and minor regional blips in Europe and North America — but never a clean, targeted failure in Asia. That makes this event statistically unusual and potentially indicative of a systemic blind spot in their regional monitoring.
Should companies stop using Cloudflare because of this?
No — but they should reconsider relying on it as a single point of failure. Cloudflare remains one of the most robust and affordable CDNs available. However, critical services should implement multi-CDN strategies or maintain fallback DNS and origin servers. This outage wasn’t a failure of Cloudflare’s technology — it was a failure of communication and risk management.
How does Cloudflare’s status page compare to other providers?
Cloudflare’s status page is clean and reliable in structure, but it lacks depth. Competitors like AWS and Google Cloud often include real-time metrics, affected services, and post-mortems within days. Cloudflare’s minimal update here — no graphs, no error rates, no customer impact — puts it behind industry standards for transparency, even if its infrastructure remains top-tier.
Could a similar outage happen again?
Absolutely. With over 300 edge locations in Asia alone, the complexity of maintaining consistent performance across diverse networks, power grids, and regulatory environments is immense. Without public post-mortems or visible system improvements, there’s no way to know if the same vulnerability still exists. For now, it’s a waiting game — and customers are left holding the risk.