On November 18, 2025, a major Cloudflare outage disrupted significant parts of the global internet for several hours. Websites protected by Cloudflare began returning widespread HTTP 5xx errors. Authentication and identity services stalled. Dashboards and APIs became unreachable. For organizations relying on Cloudflare for DNS, WAF, bot management, Zero Trust, or traffic steering, the impact was immediate and severe – sites went down and web apps were unavailable.
The following analysis is based solely on publicly available information and is not intended to make any independent factual assertions regarding Cloudflare or its products.
While early reports suggested a possible hyper-scale DDoS attack, the root cause was an internal logic failure. According to Cloudflare’s public postmortem and multiple independent analyses, the outage originated inside the protection layer itself. A faulty database permissions update triggered a cascading failure that blocked legitimate traffic and prevented administrators from accessing any operational controls.
The incident is a clear reminder that even the most advanced global platforms can experience compounded failures. Like the July 19, 2024 CrowdStrike outage, it is yet another example that shows why relying on a single vendor for mission critical operations, like traffic management and application protection introduces risk that cannot be ignored.
For a full technical recap, analysis, and detailed breakdown of the outage sequence, please refer to our published advisory post.
The Lesson: A Dual Vendor Strategy is Worth the Investment
According to the tech outlet Tom’s Guide, between $5 billion and $15 billion dollars was lost for every hour of the Cloudflare outage. The timeframe of this incident means the cost overall could reach $60 billion and could climb even higher until it is fully resolved. Can your company risk losing thousands, millions or even billions to an outage like the one suffered on November 18?
The outage also demonstrates how quickly an issue inside a single security vendor can cascade into widespread operational disruption. Organizations often consolidate DNS, WAF, CDN, bot management, API protection, and access control under one vendor for simplicity. However, this also concentrates risk. When the vendor’s protection layer fails, the entire stack fails with it.
Vendor contingency planning ensures that service continuity does not depend on the stability of a single vendor. A dual vendor strategy creates an independently functioning protection layer that stays operational even when the primary vendor is degraded or offline.
A strong contingency posture typically includes:
Redundancy across the application security stack
A second protection path remains available during outages or misconfigurations in the primary vendor.
Instant recovery without emergency reconfiguration
A contingency layer that is already connected can be activated immediately rather than during the stress of an outage.
Containment of vendor specific risk
If one vendor experiences an outage, faulty update, or logic failure, the impact does not ripple across all application services.
Complementary detection and protection capabilities
A second engine can identify attacks or anomalies that may be missed when another vendor is unstable.
Operational agility during incidents
A backup layer provides a safe environment to validate detections, compare behavior, or switch defenses during vendor side instability.
The Cloudflare outage made this painfully clear. Organizations with a secondary protection path had alternatives. Those entirely dependent on a single vendor did not.
How Radware Helps Strengthen Resilience
Radware’s architecture and operational approach support high resilience environments and multi-vendor strategies. Several capabilities directly address the challenges exposed during the Cloudflare outage.
Flexible integration in any environment
Radware can run alongside existing CDN, WAF, DNS, and traffic management providers in cloud, hybrid, and on premises environments. This allows Radware to operate as the primary or as an independent backup without requiring architectural change.
Fail safe mitigation architecture
Radware separates the mitigation engine from management systems. Even if a management dashboard becomes unreachable, the protection layer continues to function. This avoids scenarios where both the control plane and protection plane fail at the same time.
Immediate activation during vendor outages
When Radware is deployed as a secondary protection path, it can be turned on instantly. Organizations do not need to perform emergency routing changes or provisioning during a crisis.
Broad and complementary security coverage
Radware provides advanced WAF, API security, bot management, client-side protection, and behavioral L7 DDoS mitigation. This offers an independent control layer that operates even when another vendor is unstable or offline.
Disciplined global change management
Radware applies staged, controlled updates to avoid introducing correlated failures. This reduces the risk of widespread outages caused by maintenance issues.
Out of band crisis ready support
Radware’s Emergency Response Team stays reachable and operational even if other service components are affected. Customers receive guidance and real time assistance during outages or attacks.
Independent validation and monitoring
Radware can detect anomalies, attack patterns, and protection gaps when another vendor is degraded. This improves situational awareness and shortens recovery times.
Final thoughts
The Cloudflare outage is a powerful reminder that resilience cannot depend on a single vendor. Even the most established global networks can experience logic failures that cascade across their entire ecosystem. Organizations that rely solely on one vendor inherit that vendor’s operational risk.
A resilient architecture requires diversity, redundancy, and the ability to maintain protection when any one service layer fails.
Radware helps organizations ensure that a vendor outage does not become their outage. With flexible deployment options, broad security coverage, and crisis ready support, Radware provides the independent control layer and operational resilience needed in today’s interconnected environment.