However, changes in DNS settings may take up to 24 hours to go through and is therefore not really a suitable option.
Pausing would take the same time. There is no difference between pausing and unproxying. The change on Cloudflare would actually be pretty instantaneous, a delay would be because of third party resolvers.
Its immediately.
Pausing Cloudflare essentially unproxies all records without actually changing their settings. Everything in your account will be unchanged, including the records proxy status, however ever record will resolve to its actual address and not the proxy addresses (even if ). Because no request will go via the proxies, none of the other settings will apply either.
Its a quick way to switch Cloudflare to DNS-only.

You can temporarily pause Cloudflare by:

  1. Going to the Overview tab in the Cloudflare dashboard.
  2. At the bottom right of this page there is a link under Advanced Actions.
  3. Click Pause Cloudflare on Site


Pausing Cloudflare will cause your origin IP address to be returned by Cloudflare's nameservers, sending traffic directly to it rather than through Cloudflare's reverse proxy. No Cloudflare services such as SSL or WAF will be enabled on that domain or subdomains while the site is paused. An alternative to pausing Cloudflare would be to use Development Mode, which will only bypass Cloudflare's cache, but still provide other services such as SSL.

We do not recommend changing away your name servers as that can have a delay of several hours whereas pausing Cloudflare takes 5 minutes or less to temporarily resolve whatever issue you may be having.

Pausing Cloudflare will cause your origin IP address to be returned by Cloudflares nameservers, sending traffic directly to it rather than through Cloudflares reverse proxy. No Cloudflare services such as SSL or WAF will be enabled on that domain or subdomains while the site is paused.
To make sure that Cloudflare is off you can enter your Site URL at whatsmydns if you are seeing your origin server IP instead of Cloudflare then Cloudflare is not enabled on your site anymore.

:
https://community.cloudflare.com/t/pause-duration/35876
https://community.cloudflare.com/t/h...dflare/68798/2
https://support.exabytes.com.my/en/s...se-cloudflare-
https://www.thecloudkeeper.io/how-to...are-temporary/