A Cloudflare incident on November 18 impacted access to a number of websites and apps for nearly an hour. A configuration change within Cloudflare’s control systems resulted in an overload affecting edge servers. The servers began to act on out-of-date routing information, leading to the posting of 500 and 520 errors. In India the impact was noted between 15:30 IST and 16:15 IST, which included news sites, delivery apps, payment pages, and student portals.

India felt the outage first in mid-afternoon

At around 15:30 IST on Monday, users throughout India noticed sites that were freezing or half loaded. Some platforms would not load at all. Social feeds quickly filled with jokes that the internet had gone on hiatus, but the cause was fundamentally located deeper down in the infrastructure that powers much of the modern web.

Cloudflare was able to confirm that the incident began in its control layer. This component of the system coordinates routing decisions, traffic signatures, and the distribution of configuration to its global network.

How a single update sent shockwaves around the globe

It's a chain reaction story that started when Cloudflare made a change to the configuration on their servers, which manage traffic routing rules. These servers rely on internal APIs to send the instructions out to their edge nodes, & this update caused the loads to spike unevenly on those APIs, & before long, queues were building faster than they could clear up.

As the APIs began to slow down, the edge servers started getting hold of out-of-date routing data, and with that, traffic just didn't know where it was supposed to go because the data was wrong, so requests just kept getting bounced between servers instead of actually making it to the website that was supposed to be on the other end, & each failure triggered yet more browser retry attempts, which in turn just added to the queue.

Once the affected regions hit their limit, the edge systems just started spitting out 500 & 520 error codes all over the place. These codes indicate when the systems upstream fail to respond or send back incomplete info, and because millions of websites rely on Cloudflare for everything from DNS to caching & security layers, the impact just boiled up everywhere all at once.

Why the outage looked a whole lot bigger than it actually was

Cloudflare sits pretty much right between users & websites; they accelerate the traffic, filter out the hackers, and handle the domain routing for a whole lot of different services, and because of that, a fault inside Cloudflare looks to the users like the whole internet is just gone haywire.

At the exact same time in India, it happened to be a really busy online period with students logging in to class portals, workers checking their dashboards, and players checking their servers, and all of a sudden they hit error pages, along with heaps of other apps that rely on Cloudflare for stuff like certificate verification and content delivery, all showing similar glitchy behavior.

How the engineers recovered the network

Cloudflare halted the rollout when problems became evident. Engineers isolated parts of the control layer that ran a faulty configuration. They rolled back to the last stable version and rebooted the affected processes in phases, which was vital, lest bringing everything back at once would have recreated the overload.

As systems came back online and synchronized, edge servers were immediately updated with new routing data. Around 16:15 IST, most websites returned to normal. Although some services were still slow within a short period, they all cleaned up.

A technical reminder for the next generation

As we learned, a small internal update can cause a meltdown across the web. Distributed systems behave as we said earlier; they behave like gears that are connected, and if one gear stalls, the rest will slow immediately without any warning.

For students and young engineers who study infrastructure closely, this was a great real-world glimpse into how routing layers, control planes, and edge networks overlap and specifically why you should be careful testing and rolling out updates to systems that support millions of users and transactions every day.

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