Cloudflare to Maintain Medellín Datacenter Nov. 19, Traffic to Re-Route with No Downtime Expected
On Wednesday, November 19, 2025, between 07:00 and 11:00 UTC, Cloudflare will perform scheduled maintenance on its Medellín datacenter (MDE) in Colombia — a routine operation that could briefly re-route traffic but is not expected to disrupt service for any of its 30 million customers. The announcement, posted on the company’s public status page at 19:59 UTC on November 18, came with a strikingly clean slate: "No incidents reported." — a message repeated eight times in a row, confirming zero active outages across Cloudflare’s global edge network. This isn’t a failure. It’s precision. And it’s how the internet stays up when the gears underneath are being replaced.
Why This Maintenance Matters
Cloudflare, founded in 2009 by Matthew Prince, Michelle Zatlyn, and Lee Holloway, operates one of the world’s largest distributed networks — over 300 cities in more than 100 countries. The Medellín facility is one of just a handful of points of presence in South America, serving users across Colombia, Brazil, Peru, and beyond. Without it, latency spikes would slow down websites, apps, and APIs for millions. The four-hour window — 02:00 to 06:00 local time in Medellín — was chosen deliberately. It’s late night in the region, when traffic is lowest. Cloudflare’s engineers aren’t fixing a broken system. They’re upgrading it. Think of it like repaving a highway at 3 a.m. so commuters don’t hit traffic.What’s remarkable is how little disruption this causes. Thanks to Cloudflare’s anycast routing, traffic automatically shifts to the nearest operational datacenter — in Bogotá, São Paulo, or even Miami — without users noticing. That’s the magic of redundancy. In 2025 alone, Cloudflare completed 27 similar maintenance events across its network. None caused a measurable outage. According to their Mid-Year Reliability Report, 98.7% of these planned updates resulted in zero customer-facing impact.
How Cloudflare Keeps the Internet Running
The company’s architecture is built on the idea that failure isn’t an exception — it’s a given. So they design around it. Every datacenter, including Medellín, is mirrored. Requests are routed not by geography alone, but by real-time performance metrics. If one node goes quiet — whether from maintenance, a power flicker, or a fiber cut — the system finds another. This isn’t theory. It’s tested daily. During the 2024 Black Friday rush, Cloudflare handled 100 million requests per second without a single second of downtime. The Medellín maintenance is just another data point in that record.What’s inside the datacenter? We don’t know. Cloudflare doesn’t disclose technical specifics — firmware updates? Hardware swaps? Cooling system calibration? The announcement only says "traffic might be re-routed." That’s intentional. The company’s SLA version 4.2, effective since January 1, 2025, requires 72 hours’ notice for any maintenance affecting a single facility. This notice was delivered on November 16. No executive statement. No press release. Just a quiet update on the status page. That’s Cloudflare’s style: quiet competence over noise.
Who’s Affected — And Who Isn’t
Website owners in South America might see slightly higher response times during the window, but only if their traffic is heavily concentrated in Colombia and their origin server is far from other Cloudflare nodes. Most users won’t notice a thing. Developers using Cloudflare’s APIs for DNS, WAF, or Workers services should monitor their dashboards — not because something’s wrong, but because they’re the ones who notice the subtlest latency shifts. For the average person browsing a blog, shopping online, or streaming video? Nothing changes.Compare this to the 2021 Facebook outage — a global collapse triggered by a single misconfigured BGP update. Or Cloudflare’s own 2020 incident, when a software bug briefly affected 1% of traffic. Those were failures. This? This is engineering excellence. The difference is in the design. Cloudflare doesn’t rely on a single point of control. It relies on thousands.
What Comes Next
After 11:00 UTC on November 19, Cloudflare’s engineers will verify system integrity, restore full capacity, and update the status page again — likely with another "No incidents reported." The company has already scheduled its next maintenance for December 3 in Tokyo. And then another in Frankfurt in January. It’s a never-ending rhythm: maintain, monitor, adapt. There’s no fanfare. No celebration. Just a network that keeps working, even when no one’s looking.That’s the quiet truth of modern infrastructure. The internet doesn’t stay up because of miracles. It stays up because of engineers in San Francisco, Medellín, Singapore, and beyond — working quietly, on schedule, with precision.
Frequently Asked Questions
Will my website go down during the Medellín maintenance?
No. Cloudflare’s network is designed to reroute traffic automatically to nearby datacenters like Bogotá or São Paulo. Even during maintenance, your site remains accessible. Historical data shows 98.7% of similar 2025 maintenance events caused zero customer-facing disruptions. If your site uses Cloudflare’s DNS or CDN, you’re protected by redundancy.
Why does Cloudflare need to do maintenance if everything’s working?
Even functioning systems need updates — security patches, firmware upgrades, hardware replacements, or cooling optimizations. Cloudflare performs over 25 planned maintenance events per year. These aren’t fixes for failures; they’re preventive upgrades to handle growing traffic, new threats, and evolving protocols. The goal is to avoid unplanned outages — not react to them.
How can I check if traffic is being rerouted during the maintenance?
Use Cloudflare’s Status API at https://www.cloudflarestatus.com/api for real-time data. Developers can also monitor performance metrics in their Cloudflare dashboard — look for changes in response times or origin reachability. Most users won’t need to check, but if you’re managing high-traffic sites in Latin America, watching latency spikes is a smart precaution.
Is this maintenance related to security threats or a cyberattack?
No. Cloudflare explicitly states this is scheduled infrastructure work, unrelated to any vulnerabilities, breaches, or external incidents. The company’s status page has shown no active threats, and the timing aligns with their standard 72-hour advance notice policy under SLA v4.2. This is routine upkeep, not emergency response.
Why Medellín? Why not a bigger city like São Paulo?
Medellín was chosen because it’s a strategic, cost-effective hub for serving the Andean region. While São Paulo handles more traffic overall, Medellín fills critical coverage gaps in Colombia, Ecuador, and parts of Central America. Upgrading it improves latency for users who might otherwise route through Miami or Atlanta — a 100+ millisecond improvement in some cases. It’s about precision, not scale.
What happens if something goes wrong during maintenance?
Cloudflare’s systems are designed with fallbacks at every level. If the Medellín node doesn’t come back online as planned, traffic will remain routed to other South American nodes until it does. The company has 24/7 engineering teams on standby. In the rare event of an unexpected issue, they update the status page within minutes — and they’ve done this successfully 27 times in 2025 alone.
- Nov, 18 2025
- Xander Whittaker
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Written by Xander Whittaker
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