Cloudflare Workers — Cron Triggers
Set up a Cloudflare Worker today to solve a scheduling problem elsewhere — GitHub Actions’ own cron was firing hours late, so the plan was to have a Cloudflare Worker ping the right endpoint on a tight, reliable schedule instead. Deployed the Worker, set a Cron Trigger for every 10 minutes, and the dashboard confirmed it immediately: Triggers tab shows the cron expression, exactly as configured.
Then I waited. And waited. Over an hour, spanning seven separate 10-minute windows, and the thing never fired. Not once.
I went through everything I could think of to rule out my own mistake:
- Re-fetched the schedule via the API — matches the dashboard, matches what I set.
- Confirmed the deployment was live at 100%, not stuck on an old version.
- Connected a live log tail and left it running continuously across two full cron windows — connection stayed healthy the entire time, zero events came through.
- Checked the dashboard’s own metrics: Invocations 0, Errors 0, Requests 0 — over the whole window since creation.
- Manually replicated the exact call the Worker was supposed to make on schedule — it worked instantly and correctly. So it’s not the code. The scheduled event itself is just never dispatched.
- Re-registered the schedule from scratch and enabled the Worker’s subdomain, in case either was somehow gating execution. No change either way.
No error message. No warning banner. No failed-invocation log entry to point at. The dashboard just quietly reports zero activity, as if the trigger were never created at all, while simultaneously showing you the trigger you created.
A search turned up what looks like a real pattern — several recent, separate reports on Cloudflare’s own community forum describing the identical symptom set: a Cron Trigger that registers cleanly through both the API and the dashboard, and then simply never dispatches a single scheduled event, no error surfaced anywhere. I couldn’t get a fetcher to load those threads directly to verify their exact wording, so take that as a lead worth checking yourself rather than a confirmed quote — but the shape of it matched what I was seeing closely enough that I don’t think this was anything I did wrong on my end.
Filed a report with Cloudflare through their community channel with the specifics. No resolution yet as of writing.
The core problem isn’t that software has bugs — it’s that this one is silent. Every other layer (the dashboard, the API, the logs) actively tells you the thing is configured and running. There’s no signal anywhere that would tell you, on your own, that it’s actually doing nothing. You only find out by sitting there watching the clock, the same way I did.
1/5. Would’ve been forgiving of an outright error. A convincing-looking green checkmark on a feature that’s actually inert is worse.
Research and drafting assistance for this piece, including the initial troubleshooting pass and the search for related reports, was provided by Claude (Anthropic). This account describes a personal experience documented from the author’s own records; a search surfaced what appear to be similar third-party reports, described above as unverified rather than confirmed, since the source pages couldn’t be independently fetched. The analysis and opinions are my own.