Cloudflare DNS Propagation Issues

Background

I have been doing website migrations and have been updating the DNS entries of these websites to point at the new server’s IP addresses. I have been getting major propagation delays on my personal devices when checking the sites I have migrated. It took me a little while to realize that this was most likely a Cloudflare DNS issue. When I switched my personal devices DNS servers to Google’s (8.8.8.8) and they worked.

Google DNS was used to circumvent Turkey blocking Twitter, ultimately leading Turkey to block Google DNS in 2014.

I use Cloudflare DNS on all of my personal devices. I mainly do this for privacy and security reasons. They also have simple instructions to set it up on numerous devices.

  • iPhone
  • Android
  • MacOS
  • Windows
  • Linux
  • Router

Solution

After doing some googling, I stumbled across 1.1.1.1 Purge Cache. Everything worked as soon as I used this tool. It took me a while to find this tool as most of the results relate to propagation delays related to using CDN tool that Cloudflare provides.