Operational guidance

Understanding Maintenance and Availability

Also refer to Monitoring and alerts.

Cloudflare performs regular network maintenance that may impact CNI connectivity.

• Maintenance Impact: Maintenance windows average six hours. Customers who are not redundantly connected to diverse devices, for instance in single-homed PoPs, will experience a complete service disruption on CNI in that location.
• Designing for Availability: For critical applications, deploy CNI in locations that support diversity on the device level (multi-homed PoPs) to ensure protection against a single point of hardware failure and routine maintenance. Cloudflare does not guarantee coordinated maintenance between PoP locations. This means connecting to two different PoPs does not ensure protection against coincident service disruption.

Troubleshooting

When facing connectivity problems, your first action should be to check for broader service disruptions. Visit https://www.cloudflarestatus.com/ to see if any scheduled maintenance or active incidents are impacting services. This helps determine if the issue originates outside your network. Refer to Monitoring and alerts.

If no system-wide problems are reported, gather the following information before submitting a support case. Providing comprehensive details facilitates a faster resolution:

• Timeline: When the issue began and ended (if applicable), including the timezone.
• Identification: The CNI IP address or point-to-point prefix for the impacted CNI. If your CNI is part of a Magic setup, please also provide the name of the Magic Transit/WAN interconnect as listed in your dashboard.
• Physical Layer: Light levels of the CNI link (if applicable).
• Service Impact: Confirmation whether Magic Transit / WAN traffic was affected.
• Problem Description: A clear summary of the issue (for example, CNI down, BGP session down, prefixes withdrawn).