Cloudflare Rate Limiting enforcement latency during traffic spikes

Cloudflare Rate Limiting allows operators to define request thresholds to mitigate abusive traffic. However, there is an inherent gap between the moment a request threshold is exceeded and the moment the configured action—such as a JS challenge or block—is applied across the edge network.

This latency in metric aggregation and rule propagation can create a mismatch between real-time request rates and the enforcement of the limit. When diagnosing bottlenecks, it is unclear if a temporary surge in traffic is bypassing the limit due to this propagation delay or if the configured threshold is simply too high.

Given the distributed nature of the edge locations, what is the expected window of latency between threshold breach and global enforcement? How can this propagation delay be distinguished from a configuration error when analyzing firewall events?