[dns-operations] Cloudflare people here ? Problematic records served from a Cloudflare hosted zone.

[Joe Abley]

Hi Ondřej,

On 27 Nov 2025, at 12:34, Ondřej Surý <ondrej at sury.org> wrote:

> CNAME not returned for NODATA answer:
> 
> [...]
> 
> I believe the CNAME has to be returned regardless of the target existence.

Thanks, I'll mention it to the team.

If anybody else finds CNAME weirdness feel free to send it to me directly (or to the list, as you wish).

Like many other DNS providers of a certain shape, Cloudflare provides various non-standard DNS features that are generally intended to be invisible to the Internet at large, but which achieve certain things that our customers want to do. Sometimes they are not invisible, which means they are protocol violations. Sometimes we find we have particular custonmers who come to rely on the strange behaviour, which makes it more of a challenge to change. But we are working on it; our goal is certainly not to cause unpleasant surprises for others, quite the opposite.


Joe