February 21, 2026
BYO-OMG: Routes vanished, jokes exploded
Cloudflare outage on February 20, 2026
Users joke “Downtime as a Service” as patience runs thin
TLDR: Cloudflare accidentally pulled 1,100 customer IP routes for six hours, taking some services offline before rolling back and manual fixes. Commenters praise transparency but slam testing, meme “Downtime as a Service,” and debate if outages are rising or just more visible.
Cloudflare’s post says a change to how it handles customer‑owned IP addresses (BYOIP, “bring your own IP”) accidentally yanked about 1,100 internet routes for roughly six hours, even making 1.1.1.1 throw errors. Engineers rolled back and manually restored stragglers, but the comments? On fire.
The prevailing mood: patience wearing thin. boarush says businesses buy uptime, not apologies. CommonGuy roasts testing, arguing a staging setup that missed a “delete all the things” bug looks like zero end‑to‑end testing. atty sparks a meta debate: more outages lately, or just noticing more? It’s transparency vs trust, and the crowd is split.
Humor cut the outrage. dryarzeg’s “DaaS — Downtime as a Service” became the meme, while blibble asked if the post was LLM‑generated because parts “make no sense.” Some praised Cloudflare’s openness and quick rollback, but the spicy consensus: transparency isn’t an SLA. When the “internet’s map” (BGP, the system that tells traffic where to go) glitches, people want slower, safer changes—and fewer apologies.
Key Points
- •Cloudflare’s February 20, 2026 outage was caused by a BYOIP configuration change, not a cyberattack.
- •Approximately 1,100 prefixes (25% of BYOIP) were withdrawn between 17:56 and 18:46 UTC, making some services unreachable.
- •Cloudflare published guidance at 19:19 UTC for customers to re-advertise prefixes via the dashboard.
- •Around 20:20 UTC, about 800 prefixes were restored; ~300 required manual restoration at 23:03 UTC due to an edge configuration bug.
- •The incident lasted 6 hours and 7 minutes; not all BYOIP customers were affected due to iterative rollout and quick reversion.