Fri Sep 20 13:05:56 UTC 2024: ## Cloudflare Apologizes for Outage Affecting Business Plan Websites

**San Francisco, CA** – Cloudflare, a leading web infrastructure and security company, has issued an apology for an outage that affected some websites on its Business plan for approximately one hour on September 17, 2024. The outage was caused by an internal software error during a routine maintenance procedure.

The incident occurred when Cloudflare attempted to withdraw fifteen IPv4 prefixes from the Internet’s global routing table. This process was intended to free up these addresses for other purposes. However, a bug in a legacy code system resulted in 1,661 customer websites remaining linked to these addresses, leading to a disruption in their traffic flow.

Cloudflare’s network experienced a 10 Gbps drop in traffic to the affected websites during the outage. While IPv6 traffic was unaffected, the outage resulted in errors for users attempting to access these websites.

“We are very sorry for this outage and the disruption it caused our customers,” said a Cloudflare spokesperson. “This was an isolated incident, and we have identified and fixed the specific bug that caused it.”

Cloudflare has taken several steps to prevent similar incidents in the future, including:

* Implementing tests to verify that all websites have been properly renumbered during future address reassignment procedures.
* Improving the processes associated with withdrawing Cloudflare-owned prefixes, including manual and automated verification of traffic levels.
* Reviewing every use of stored procedures and functions associated with legacy systems, reimplementing functionality where necessary with modern standards of documentation and test coverage.

Cloudflare emphasizes its commitment to providing a reliable and stable service for its customers. The company is dedicated to learning from this incident and making ongoing improvements to its infrastructure and processes.

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