Navigating Cloudflare Outages: Troubleshooting Latency and Service Disruptions

Cloudflare users recently faced a period of intermittent service disruptions and significant latency spikes, predominantly affecting regions across Europe. Reports from Serbia, France, and Finland indicated issues ranging from complete site inaccessibility to SSL handshake failures and problems loading the Cloudflare dashboard itself. Interestingly, users in the MENA region reported no such issues, suggesting a geographically localized problem. This incident underscores the importance of robust monitoring strategies and diversified incident response plans for any service relying heavily on a CDN or proxy like Cloudflare. Users are encouraged to utilize direct access tests and cross-reference multiple status sources when troubleshooting performance or availability issues.

Identifying the Problem

Users described their websites becoming unreachable or experiencing "SSL handshake failed" errors, even when their origin web servers were functioning correctly with valid certificates. The Cloudflare dashboard, crucial for managing services, also failed to load for many. Initially, the official Cloudflare status page remained silent, leading users to seek information elsewhere before an incident was eventually posted.

Diagnostic Approaches and Observations

A key takeaway was a proactive diagnostic approach shared by one user. They developed a bash script to compare site access times directly via IP versus through Cloudflare's proxy. The script meticulously measured dns, connect, tls, TTFB (Time To First Byte), and total times. Analysis of the results showed a dramatic increase in latencies when routed through Cloudflare, adding close to a minute to the total load time, primarily due to TTFB and tls overheads. This method proved effective in isolating Cloudflare as the source of performance degradation.

Another common method involved checking third-party status aggregators like Downdetector. However, during this particular incident, Downdetector itself experienced issues for some users, prompting the use of an alternative like downdetectorsdowndetector.com. This highlights the importance of having multiple verification methods when critical services are affected.

Official Status and User Perception

While Cloudflare eventually updated its status page to acknowledge an active incident, there was user feedback that the status updates were "egregiously misleading," suggesting the impact was more widespread than officially reported, affecting not just the dashboard but also core proxied services. This discrepancy between official communication and user experience is a recurring theme during major outages.