Cloudflare R2 API Issues Hit Dashboard, KIX Region HTTP 500s

What happened

Cloudflare experienced two separate R2 storage service incidents within four days. On April 23, the company resolved dashboard API issues preventing users from loading R2 buckets via the web interface, with higher than normal API latency reported. Four days earlier on April 19, R2 customers in the KIX (Osaka) region encountered HTTP 500 responses from the storage service. Both incidents were resolved within approximately 70 minutes of initial detection. Cloudflare's status page indicated investigation and monitoring phases before full resolution.

Business impact

Teams relying on R2 for website assets, media delivery, or backup storage faced potential service disruption and management interface failures. HTTP 500 errors in the KIX region could have caused broken images, failed file uploads, or content delivery failures for Asian markets. Dashboard API issues prevented real-time bucket management and monitoring during critical deployment windows.

Background

Cloudflare R2 competes directly with AWS S3 as an object storage solution, attracting enterprise customers seeking cost-effective alternatives for large-scale file storage and content delivery. Many organizations use R2 to serve website assets, store user uploads, or handle media files for e-commerce platforms. The service has gained significant adoption among companies looking to reduce bandwidth costs while maintaining global content distribution capabilities.

What this means for your team

Implement monitoring alerts for your R2 bucket endpoints beyond Cloudflare's status page notifications. Set up automated health checks that test both file retrieval and upload operations across multiple regions where your traffic originates. Configure fallback CDN origins or backup storage providers for critical assets to avoid single points of failure. Review your incident response playbooks to include object storage failures as a potential root cause for website performance issues.

What to watch

Monitor Cloudflare's engineering blog for post-incident analysis that might reveal underlying infrastructure changes or capacity issues. Track whether similar regional outages occur in other Cloudflare locations, which could signal broader platform stability concerns.

Sources

Cloudflare Health check issues
Cloudflare Status
Cloudflare Dashboard API Issues Affecting R2 Buckets
Cloudflare Status
Cloudflare Access Availability Issues
Cloudflare Status

Timeline

2d ago now