Cloudflare announced ongoing scheduled maintenance across two major data centers, a move that has sparked concern over the stability of global internet traffic following recent widespread outages.

According to the company’s system alerts, engineers were already on site when the message indicated, “In progress – Scheduled maintenance is currently in progress. We will provide updates as necessary.”

The work, which began at 10:00 UTC in Bogota (BOG) and 09:00 UTC in Detroit (DTW), is expected to run for several hours.

In its notice for the Bogota region, Cloudflare stated, “Traffic might be rerouted from this location, hence there is a possibility of a slight increase in latency during this maintenance window for end-users in the affected region.”

Users across multiple regions reported slower page loads and temporary connection interruptions, though the company emphasized that the impact was expected and controlled.

In the Detroit alert, Cloudflare repeated its guidance: “Please make sure you are expecting this traffic to fail over elsewhere during this maintenance window as network interfaces in this data center may become temporarily unavailable.”

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Recent History of Outages Heightens Developer Caution

The maintenance comes barely weeks after Cloudflare suffered a major global outage that temporarily knocked several high-traffic platforms offline, triggering warnings from cybersecurity experts about the risks of centralizing essential internet routing.

During previous disruptions, major sites including X, Canva, Zoom, and Substack were unreachable, with many users encountering “500 internal server error” pages.

Cloudflare, which routes and secures traffic for an estimated fifth of global websites, plays a critical role as a backbone intermediary for platforms, businesses and applications.

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Experts Warn of Structural Weakness in Global Internet Routing

Cybersecurity analysts say the latest maintenance window highlights a systemic reliance on singular traffic channels.

Jake Moore, a globally recognized security adviser, has previously warned that, “When large providers experience downtime, thousands of websites effectively vanish from the web instantly due to structural bottlenecks.”

“The problems often lie with the fact that we are using an old network to direct internet users around the world to websites but it simply highlights that there is one huge single point of failure in this legacy design,” Moore adds.

Graeme Stewart, head of the public sector at Check Point, a cybersecurity firm credited with creating the first firewall, lamented that,  “Cloudflare going down today sits in the same pattern we saw with the recent AWS and Azure outages. These platforms are vast, efficient and used by almost every part of modern life.”

“Many organisations still run everything through one route with no meaningful backup. When that route fails, there is no fallback. That is the weakness we keep seeing play out,” Stewart concludes.

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