On February 20, 2026, Cloudflare experienced a major service disruption when a configuration change to their Bring Your Own IP (BYOIP) system caused 1,100 customer prefixes to be withdrawn from the internet. The outage began at 17:48 UTC and lasted 6 hours and 7 minutes, affecting services like 1.1.1.1 DNS and various Cloudflare products.

Cloudflare engineers traced the issue to a buggy API query in their Addressing API that incorrectly removed prefixes marked for deletion. The change was applied iteratively, so not all BYOIP customers were affected initially. Some customers could self-remediate through the dashboard, but approximately 300 prefixes required manual restoration by Cloudflare engineers due to a software bug that removed service configurations from edge servers.

The incident impacted Core CDN and Security Services, Spectrum, Dedicated Egress, and Magic Transit, causing connection timeouts and failures for affected customers. Cloudflare has since apologized and outlined steps to prevent similar outages, including improvements to their Code Orange: Fail Small initiative aimed at automating manual processes and implementing safer deployment workflows.