On August 21, 2025, an influx of traffic directed toward clients hosted in AWS us-east-1 caused severe congestion on links between Cloudflare and us-east-1. In this post, we explain what the failure was, why it occurred, and what we’re doing to make sure this doesn’t happen again.

At approximately 16:27 UTC on August, 21, 2025, a customer started sending many requests from AWS us-east-1 to Cloudflare for objects in Cloudflare’s cache. These requests generated a volume of response traffic that saturated all available direct peering connections between Cloudflare and AWS

Over-centralized internet infrastructure?