On September 12, 2025, Cloudflare experienced a significant outage that disrupted its dashboard and several APIs for over an hour. It left users unable to make configuration changes or access key dashboard functionality.
What Went Wrong?
The root cause was deceptively simple: a React useEffect hook is misconfigured in the dashboard code. A problematic object in the hook’s dependency array was being recreated on every state or prop change, causing the hook to re-run repeatedly. This led to a flood of unnecessary calls to the Tenant Service API, which handles request authorization. The result is a self-inflicted DDoS that overwhelmed the service and triggered cascading failures across the dashboard and related APIs.
Cloudflare’s engineering team responded quickly by scaling resources, applying rate limits, and eventually reverting problematic changes but the incident exposed gaps in observability, deployment safeguards, and root cause detection. Notably, the Tenant Service wasn’t yet using Argo Rollouts, which could have automatically rolled back the faulty deployment.
How Conductr Could Have Helped
Root Cause Agent (RCA)
Conductr’s AI-powered alerting system identifies the exact error location and all impacted dependencies right inside the IDE. In Cloudflare’s case, the repeated failed API calls from the dashboard could have been flagged instantly with the team.
The moment that misconfigured useEffect began hammering the Tenant Service, Conductr would’ve automatically spun up a bug ticket. As the error propagated across the application, that same ticket would be updated, linking every instance back to the root cause. That means faster mean time to resolution, quicker rollback, and a significantly shorter outage window.
Conductr auto-generates deployment summaries and tracks real-time errors grouped by root cause. This would have helped Cloudflare’s teams correlate the dashboard release with the spike in Tenant Service traffic, accelerating rollback decisions and reducing downtime.
Conductr’s real-time feedback ensures developers catch issues as they emerge, not after they’ve hit production. The dashboard bug could have been caught during staging or CI with Conductr’s proactive error detection and IDE-integrated alerts. Developers cut down on investigation time and focus on solving the problem with real-time insights powered by RCA
Overall, Cloudflare’s outage was a reminder that even the most resilient platforms can falter due to subtle bugs and overlooked deployment safeguards. But it also highlighted the importance of fast feedback, intelligent observability, and developer-centric tooling.
Conductr isn’t just a safety net, it’s a productivity accelerator that helps teams ship faster, safer, and smarter. In a world where a single hook can take down your dashboard, having Conductr in your corner could make all the difference.
