What is the name of the domain?
Seemingly any Cloudflare domain servicing South Africa
What is the issue you’re encountering
High latency for traffic that should be routed via local South African Cloudflare data centers but is send via London
What steps have you taken to resolve the issue?
Analysis of our Cloudflare events and traffic. Tracerts, curl requests, testing from multiple locations
What are the steps to reproduce the issue?
I was noticing some poor latency coming from our AWS EC2 / ECS and EKS instances running our of the af-south-1 region which is hosted in Cape Town.
After digging around I unearthed what seems like quite a serious issue with the way Cloudflare is routing local South African traffic (seemingly mostly from the Western Cape) via London.
At 23:00+2 every single night most of our South African traffic is routed via the Cape Town data center and then at 07:00+2 every morning it is reverted to the London data center incurring 350+ms on all requests to our site.
The Cloudflare status pages however indicate “Cape Town is Operational”
This effects the bunk of our website traffic and as far as I can see ALL traffic coming out of the AWS af-south-1 region if trying to get to a url managed by Cloudflare.
Below is our HTTP Traffic data from the last 7 days, clearly showing the “saw tooth” of traffic being routed incorrectly to London.
