Worker fetch to subdomain does not work

I have a worker that’s under worker.example.com. Within the worker, there’s a fetch pointing to external.example.com. DNS for the domain is handled by Cloudflare. The worker is obviously hosted there, but the external endpoint is an A record pointing to an external API (i.e. api.external.com).

No matter what I do, that request never fires. Using the original endpoint (api.external.com) works just fine. And using that API as external.example.com works just fine outside the Worker.

The problem is specifically within the Worker, trying to fetch a same domain endpoint. Is there something I need to do on Cloudflare to make this work or is it simply not possible?