Upstream Alert: Your website can't load!

A quiet config change in June mislabeled Cloudflare’s production DNS (1.1.1.1) as part of a pre-prod test system.

RCA: https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-1-1-1-1-incident-on-july-14-2025/

What happened?

On July 14th, 2025, Cloudflare’s DNS resolver service, the famous 1.1.1.1, went dark for over an hour. If you suddenly couldn’t load a website around that time, this was probably why. The outage was global, lasting 62 minutes, and it all started from an old configuration that nobody was looking at.

Do you know why 1.1.1.1 is famous? Probably because it was launched on April Fools! And also because benchmarks consistently show faster performances than Google DNS resolver 8.8.8.8.

Cloudflare’s DNS service is delivered globally using a technology called anycast. An IP address (such as 1.1.1.1) is advertised from multiple locations worldwide, and the requests to it are routed to the nearest available data center and server.