Cloudflare Error 1016 “Origin DNS error” on api.openai.com at 2026-01-07 11:43 UTC

[rgralhoz]

Hi all,

I encountered a repeated Cloudflare Error 1016 (Origin DNS error) when calling the OpenAI API from AWS West Coast servers.

Details:

• Time (UTC): 2026-01-07 11:43:06
• Local time: 3:43 AM PST
• Endpoint: https://api.openai.com ;
  • more specifically:
  • client.chat.completions.with_raw_response.create(…)
• Cloudflare Ray ID: 9ba3320ebd16ff0a
• The response was HTML (Cloudflare error page), not JSON.
• This happened ~30 times within a short 2min window.
• Calls before and after were normal.
• It appears to have happened outside any documented incident on status.openai.com.
  • (No, it’s not the current incident on Increased error rate for ChatGPT and API for prompts with images; I did not use images)
  • I also read this old thread on a different issue w/Cloudflare: API access failed (showing cloudflare block page)

What I think happened:
Cloudflare edge node(s) failed to resolve the origin DNS, resulting in an undocumented transient failure. The official status page didn’t show an incident at this morning timeframe.

Steps taken:

• I opened a support ticket via Help Center (after talking to their AI Chat in https://help.openai.com/en/articles/1000499-troubleshooting-api-errors-and-latency).
• Provided timestamp, Ray ID, and details.

Questions:

1. Has anyone seen similar Cloudflare DNS errors with the OpenAI API?
2. Does this match known edge / regional DNS issues not tracked on status.openai.com?

Thanks in advance for any insights!

[_j]

@rgralhoz

Cloudflare Error 1016

The likely cause: the edge worker (rate limiter etc) that runs on Cloudflare had a DNS server outage, failing to lookup a resource (like "get api_key’s active status, etc), and is configured in reverse-proxy because OpenAI doesn’t want Cloudflare to be their complete DNS host, then maybe some name change propagation issues for a short while?

Fetch API in CNAME setup - Known issues

It is good to report, but likely net monkeys doing changes with unavoidable impact done in the middle of their night.