The short answer: cloudflare is reliable overall but not incident-free: StatusBird's independent monitoring recorded 99.88% availability with 2 major incidents totaling 2 hours 22 minutes of downtime in the last 90 days.
Below is the data behind that answer and how Cloudflare compares to its peers.
What is Cloudflare?
Cloudflare is a CDN, DNS, and security network that sits in front of a large share of the web, including many e-commerce storefronts. Stores use it to cache static assets, resolve DNS, terminate SSL, block bots and DDoS attacks, and run edge logic through Workers. Because it proxies all traffic for a domain, it is in the request path for every page view.
Cloudflare uptime and outage history
| Metric (90 days, as of August 2026) | Value |
|---|---|
| Availability | 99.88% |
| Reliability grade | B+ |
| Major incidents | 2 |
| Total major-outage downtime | 2 hours 22 minutes |
| Average incident duration | 1 hour 11 minutes |
| Most recent major incident | August 12, 2026 |
| Checks in window | 61,595 |
Among the 4 infrastructure services StatusBird monitors, Cloudflare ranks number 4 for 90-day availability.
What happens to your store when Cloudflare goes down?
When Cloudflare has problems, your storefront can become unreachable even though your origin server is perfectly healthy, because customer requests never make it past the edge. Visitors typically see Cloudflare-branded 5xx error pages such as 502 or 522, or DNS lookups fail entirely if the outage hits Cloudflare DNS. Checkout, product pages, and any subdomain proxied through Cloudflare all fail together, and third-party services you rely on may be down at the same time since many of them also run behind Cloudflare.
This pattern is not unique to any one vendor. The Uptime Institute's Annual Outage Analysis has found year after year that a growing share of serious outages originate with third-party and cloud providers rather than in-house systems, and that most significant outages now carry six-figure costs.
Typical symptoms during a Cloudflare outage:
- Visitors see Cloudflare error pages like 502 Bad Gateway, 522 Connection Timed Out, or 500 with Cloudflare branding
- Your domain fails to resolve or resolves intermittently
- Traffic in your analytics drops to near zero across all pages at once
- The Cloudflare dashboard and API are unreachable or erroring
- Several unrelated services you use are down simultaneously
If you are in the middle of an incident right now, see what to do when Cloudflare goes down for a step-by-step playbook.
Frequently asked questions
My store shows a Cloudflare 502 or 522 error. Is my hosting down or is Cloudflare down?
A Cloudflare-branded error page means the request reached Cloudflare, so start by checking cloudflarestatus.com. If Cloudflare reports an incident, your origin is likely fine; if Cloudflare is healthy, a 522 usually means Cloudflare cannot reach your origin server and the problem is on your hosting side.
Can I bypass Cloudflare to get my store back online during their outage?
Often yes, by setting the affected DNS records to DNS only mode so traffic skips the Cloudflare proxy. Be aware you lose Cloudflare's caching, bot protection, and possibly SSL termination while bypassed, and if the outage affects Cloudflare DNS itself, changes may be slow to take effect.
How this data is measured
StatusBird checks Cloudflare's status every 2 minutes, around the clock, independently of the vendor. The availability figure counts major and critical outages only; minor degradation is excluded so numbers are not skewed by vendors that report small blips near-continuously. Grades run from A+ to F. See the live numbers on the Cloudflare reliability page and current status on the Cloudflare status page, or browse all 84 service grades.
Know before your customers do
StatusBird monitors Cloudflare and 83 other services online stores depend on, plus your own storefront, every 2 minutes. When something goes down you get an SMS, email, or Slack alert with plain-English context, usually before the official status page catches up. Start monitoring free, no card required for the free plan.