New York, Feb 23, 2026, 05:27 EST — Premarket
- Cloudflare shares were up 0.2% in premarket trading after a sharp drop on Friday.
- Cloudflare said a Feb. 20 outage tied to its BYOIP service was triggered by an internal change, not a cyberattack.
- Traders are watching for any follow-through on reliability fixes and comments from management at upcoming conferences.
Cloudflare shares edged up 0.2% in premarket trading on Monday after sliding 8.1% to close at $176.99 on Friday. The stock was last indicated at $177.37 in extended trading. (MarketBeat)
The move keeps the focus on reliability at a company that sits in the middle of a lot of internet traffic. When a network provider breaks, customers feel it fast — and investors tend to price that risk in before the next session opens.
Cloudflare’s detailed account of the disruption landed over the weekend, giving markets something firmer than social-media chatter to trade on. It also tried to shut down a familiar fear in cybersecurity names: that an outage might really be an attack.
In a post-mortem on Saturday, Cloudflare said a change to how it manages IP addresses for customers using its “Bring Your Own IP” (BYOIP) service unintentionally withdrew customer IP “prefixes” — blocks of internet addresses — from the routing system that directs traffic across the web. It said the incident lasted 6 hours and 7 minutes, withdrew about 1,100 BYOIP prefixes and was “not caused, directly or indirectly, by a cyberattack,” adding: “We let you down today.” The company said it is tightening API checks, redesigning rollback mechanisms and adding monitoring to act as a circuit breaker when withdrawals happen too quickly or too broadly. (The Cloudflare Blog)
Cloudflare’s status page showed the company telling customers they could self-mitigate by re-advertising prefixes through its dashboard, while also flagging that some customers could not reload IPs that way and that Cloudflare was working on a fix. The same page also logged a separate Analytics Engine API issue on Sunday that it later marked resolved. (Cloudflare Status)
One customer, Laravel Cloud, said it suffered a connectivity outage of about 3 hours and 15 minutes and blamed a Cloudflare incident that withdrew IP prefix advertisements routing traffic to its services. Laravel said no customer data was lost or compromised and described the problem as “entirely network-level,” adding it had not yet built redundancy into its “IP announcement layer.” (Laravel)
BYOIP is used by customers that want to keep their own public internet addresses while running traffic through Cloudflare. BGP — Border Gateway Protocol — is the routing language networks use to decide where to send that traffic. Pull a prefix out of BGP and traffic can end up with nowhere to go.
Cloudflare has sold itself as a security and performance layer for companies trying to keep applications online while fending off attacks. That pitch helps in a market paying up for infrastructure tied to AI-driven workloads, but it leaves little room for operational slips.
Earlier this month, Cloudflare forecast annual sales above Wall Street estimates and CEO Matthew Prince said the shift toward AI agents was “a fundamental re-platforming of the internet.” The company’s upbeat tone then was aimed at growth; this week, investors are back to uptime. (Reuters)
But the risk case is straightforward. If big customers decide they need more redundancy — or start splitting traffic more aggressively across providers — the incident can linger in retention and net expansion metrics long after the routers settle down.
Cloudflare competes with firms such as Akamai and Fastly in edge delivery and security services, and customers often juggle more than one vendor. That makes reliability both a selling point and a soft spot when something breaks.
Next up, investors will look for any fresh commentary from Cloudflare executives at the Baird Silicon Slopes Conference on Feb. 26 and Morgan Stanley’s Technology, Media & Telecom Conference on March 3, where questions on incident controls and customer impact are likely to surface. (MarketScreener)
