By Evan Schuman
Publication Date: 2026-01-10 04:19:00
Exposes architectural fragility
Networking consultant Yvette Schmitter, CEO of the Fusion Collective consulting firm, said the Cloudflare change “exposed Cisco’s architectural fragility when [some Cisco] switches worldwide entered fatal reboot loops every 10-30 minutes.”
What happened? “Cloudflare changed record ordering. Cisco’s firmware, instead of handling unexpected DNS responses gracefully, treated it as fatal and crashed with core dumps. Neither vendor’s testing caught this basic interoperability failure,” Schmitter said. “Cisco has privately acknowledged the issue to customers, but as of January 9 has released no public advisory, no patch, no field notice, leaving enterprises implementing workarounds that disable DNS functionality on network infrastructure.”
Another analyst who was concerned about the nature of the incident is Sanchit Vir Gogia, chief analyst at Greyhound Research.
“What Cloudflare has described is a change in behavior…
