🚨 BOLO: Widespread Internet Disruption from Cloudflare Infrastructure Failure

⚠️ legal professionals need to know how to adjust when the internet’s infrastructure goes down!

On November 18, 2025, at 11:20 UTC, Cloudflare experienced a significant network outage that disrupted critical internet services relied upon by millions globally, including legal professionals and their practice management tools. The incident lasted approximately six hours before full resolution at 17:06 UTC.

The outage originated from a latent bug within Cloudflare's Bot Management configuration file. During a routine configuration update, the file size exceeded anticipated parameters, causing the bot detection module to fail and triggering cascading HTTP 500 errors across the network. The root cause was neither a cyberattack nor malicious activity, but rather a software defect in the core proxy system that processes all traffic transiting Cloudflare's infrastructure.

Impact on Legal Professionals: Law firms utilizing cloud-based practice management systems, document automation platforms, and client communication portals may have experienced access disruptions. Websites hosting legal resources, contract repositories, and time-tracking applications served through Cloudflare may have been unavailable. Authentication systems, including Cloudflare Access—commonly deployed for secure remote work environments—failed broadly during the incident.

Critical Irony: Downdetector, the primary outage-monitoring platform relied upon by IT professionals to confirm infrastructure problems, was itself offline during the incident due to Cloudflare dependency.

Operational Lessons: This event underscores the concentration risk inherent in modern internet infrastructure. Legal practices should evaluate redundancy protocols, maintain documented failover procedures, and ensure business continuity plans account for third-party provider dependencies that exist outside their direct control.

👨‍⚖️ Ethical Obligations: Under ABA Model Rules 1.1 (technological competence), 1.6 (confidentiality), and 5.3 (third-party vendor supervision), lawyers must document both incidents' impact on client matters and reassess business continuity protocols.

✅ Action Items: Review your practice's infrastructure vendor relationships and assess SLA terms for meaningful uptime guarantees and compensation mechanisms.