Cloudflare experienced elevated HTTP 5xx errors affecting its CDN and cache infrastructure in Chicago’s ORD data center for about an hour on August 24, 2026.
On August 24, 2026, Cloudflare reported a brief spike in HTTP 5xx errors that impacted its content delivery network (CDN) and cache services originating from the ORD data center in Chicago.
Scope of the outage
The incident affected customers relying on Cloudflare’s edge servers in the Chicago region, causing failed requests and degraded performance for roughly one hour.
During the window, users experienced error responses such as 502 Bad Gateway and 504 Gateway Timeout, which are typical indicators of upstream server or network issues.
Root cause analysis
Cloudflare’s engineering team traced the problem to a transient failure in the caching layer of the ORD facility. The malfunction triggered a cascade of 5xx responses as edge nodes were unable to retrieve or serve cached content.
The issue was isolated to a subset of hardware responsible for cache lookups, and no broader network or software bugs were identified.
Mitigation and restoration
Operators rerouted traffic away from the affected nodes and performed a rapid hardware reset, which restored normal service within approximately 60 minutes.
Post‑incident monitoring confirmed that error rates returned to baseline levels and no further disruptions were observed.
Impact on customers
While the outage was limited in duration, websites and applications that depend on Cloudflare’s edge caching in the Chicago region experienced temporary downtime or slower load times.
- Increased latency for end‑users accessing cached assets
- Intermittent 5xx responses for API calls
- Potential loss of revenue for e‑commerce sites during the outage
Cloudflare issued a status update acknowledging the incident and confirming that remediation steps had been completed.