CDN resilience · 8 min read

Cloudflare Outage Today: How Load-Balanced CDNs Keep Your Website Online

The Cloudflare outage today has reminded everyone how fragile the web can be. In this guide, I’ll show you how businesses in Hinckley, Leicestershire (and beyond) can use load-balanced CDNs so your site stays up even when a big provider has a bad day.

By SpotOn Web Design · 18 November 2025 · Hinckley, Leicestershire

What Happened in the Cloudflare Outage Today?

On 18 November 2025, a major Cloudflare outage caused error messages and broken pages across a big chunk of the internet. Popular services such as X (Twitter), ChatGPT, Spotify and several government and financial sites briefly became unavailable while Cloudflare engineers rolled out a fix.

According to early reports, the Cloudflare outage today was triggered by an internal configuration issue on their network, rather than a cyber-attack. Once the problem was identified, Cloudflare deployed a fix and traffic slowly returned to normal across affected regions.

Useful external coverage of the Cloudflare outage today

Key lesson from the Cloudflare outage today: If your website has only one CDN or one infrastructure provider in front of it, that provider is a single point of failure.

Why a Single CDN (Even Cloudflare) Isn’t Enough

Cloudflare is excellent for performance and security, but the Cloudflare outage today shows that even the best platforms can have incidents. If all your traffic goes through a single CDN:

Any outage at that CDN instantly affects your whole website.
You’re locked into one provider’s pricing and features.
There’s no easy way to switch if they have a regional issue.

The solution is to use a load-balanced, multi-CDN architecture where Cloudflare is still your main edge, but a second CDN is ready to take over when there’s a problem.

Cloudflare Outage Strategy: High-Level Load-Balanced CDN Architecture

Here’s a simple high-level architecture that keeps your site online when there’s a Cloudflare outage:

Users
  ↓
DNS with health checks / failover
  ├── Cloudflare (primary CDN + WAF)
  └── Secondary CDN (Fastly / CloudFront / Akamai)
        ↓
      Origin server (locked to CDN IPs only)

In normal operation, most traffic flows through Cloudflare. During a Cloudflare outage today (or any future one), your DNS provider spots a problem and automatically sends traffic to the secondary CDN instead.

Step-by-Step: Setting Up Load-Balanced CDNs for Resilience

Below is a generic step-by-step guide you can follow. It works well with Cloudflare plus another CDN such as Fastly, AWS CloudFront or Akamai.

1. Prepare your origin properly

Give your origin a private-style hostname, e.g. origin.spotonwebdesign.internal.
Configure your firewall / security group to allow HTTP/HTTPS only from:
- Cloudflare IP ranges
- Your secondary CDN’s IP ranges
Block direct access from the public internet so attackers can’t bypass your CDNs.

2. Configure Cloudflare as your primary CDN

Point www.spotonwebdesign.co.uk to your origin through Cloudflare in “proxied” mode.
Enable SSL/TLS (Full or Full Strict), basic WAF and sensible caching.
Verify that your site works normally via Cloudflare.

3. Add a secondary CDN for Cloudflare outage protection

You can choose Fastly, AWS CloudFront, Akamai or another reputable CDN. As an example:

Create a new service and set the backend to origin.spotonwebdesign.internal.
Enable HTTPS and ensure SNI and certificates are correct.
Add a separate hostname, for example cdn-backup.spotonwebdesign.co.uk.

4. Implement DNS-level health checks and failover

Use a DNS provider that supports health checks and failover (e.g. Amazon Route 53, NS1, DNS Made Easy). Configure:

Primary record: www.spotonwebdesign.co.uk → Cloudflare edge (proxied hostname).
Secondary record: www.spotonwebdesign.co.uk → backup CDN hostname (e.g. cdn-backup.spotonwebdesign.co.uk).
Health check: a small “/health” endpoint served via Cloudflare, returning simple JSON or text.

If the health check fails — as would happen during a severe Cloudflare outage like today — the DNS provider automatically stops using the Cloudflare record and fails over to your secondary CDN.

5. Test your Cloudflare outage scenario

Don’t wait for the next Cloudflare outage to test your setup. You can simulate issues by:

Temporarily failing the health check (returning 500 instead of 200).
Disabling the relevant record and ensuring DNS switches to the backup.
Checking that your origin is only reachable from CDN IPs.

Pro tip: Log which CDN is currently serving each request using a header (for example, X-Edge-CDN: cloudflare or X-Edge-CDN: backup) so you can see failover in your logs.

Example: Surviving a Cloudflare Outage with Cloudflare + Fastly

To make this more concrete, here’s how a Cloudflare + Fastly multi-CDN setup might look. This is ideal if the Cloudflare outage today has made you rethink your architecture.

DNS layout

www.spotonwebdesign.co.uk  →  Cloudflare (primary)
                           →  Fastly (secondary / backup)

origin.spotonwebdesign.internal → Your web server / hosting

Cloudflare settings

Origin: origin.spotonwebdesign.internal
Proxy: ON (orange cloud)
SSL/TLS: Full Strict
WAF: enabled with sensible rules

Fastly settings

Service backend: origin.spotonwebdesign.internal
Domain: cdn-backup.spotonwebdesign.co.uk
Optional: add X-Edge-CDN: fastly header for observability

What the Cloudflare Outage Today Means for Hinckley, Leicestershire Businesses

If you run a business website in Hinckley, Leicestershire — whether it’s a trades site, a local shop, or a professional services firm — the Cloudflare outage today is a wake-up call. Customers expect your website to “just work”, and many don’t care that a huge global provider is having a bad day.

By investing a little time in a load-balanced CDN setup, you can:

Stay online when there’s another Cloudflare outage or similar incident.
Serve visitors faster from multiple networks and regions.
Reduce risk from single-provider failures and routing issues.

Cloudflare Outage & Load-Balanced CDN FAQ

Do I have to stop using Cloudflare because of today’s outage?

No. Cloudflare is still a strong choice. The most practical response to the Cloudflare outage today is not to abandon it, but to avoid relying on any one provider entirely. Use Cloudflare as part of a multi-CDN or multi-layered setup.

Is multi-CDN expensive for small businesses?

It doesn’t have to be. Many DNS providers and CDNs have generous free or low-cost tiers. The main cost is the initial setup time and some light ongoing monitoring.

Can you help me set this up for my Hinckley business?

Yes. If you’re based in Hinckley or the wider Leicestershire area, I can help you design, build and monitor a resilient website configuration using Cloudflare, a backup CDN and sensible SEO-focused web design.

Need Help After the Cloudflare Outage Today?

If the Cloudflare outage today has you worried about your own website, get in touch and I’ll happily review your setup and suggest a practical multi-CDN approach.

SpotOn Web Design – Hinckley, Leicestershire
Email: hello@spotonwebdesign.co.uk
Tel: TODO-TELEPHONE

Or visit the homepage: spotonwebdesign.co.uk