diff --git a/CHANGELOG.md b/CHANGELOG.md
index 7d7497afd5..12415e5348 100644
--- a/CHANGELOG.md
+++ b/CHANGELOG.md
@@ -317,6 +317,7 @@ Ansible Changes By Release
 * Fix for hostname module on RHEL 7.5 (https://github.com/ansible/ansible/issues/31811)
 * Fix provider password leak in logs for asa modules (https://github.com/ansible/ansible/issues/32343)
 * Fix tagging for dynamodb_table if region is not explicitly passed to the module (https://github.com/ansible/ansible/pull/32557)
+* Fix Python 3 decode error in `cloudflare_dns` (https://github.com/ansible/ansible/pull/32065)
 
 ### Known Bugs
 * Implicit localhost is getting ansible_connection from all:vars instead of
diff --git a/lib/ansible/modules/net_tools/cloudflare_dns.py b/lib/ansible/modules/net_tools/cloudflare_dns.py
index 34fbae5010..a5c9475ec8 100644
--- a/lib/ansible/modules/net_tools/cloudflare_dns.py
+++ b/lib/ansible/modules/net_tools/cloudflare_dns.py
@@ -274,10 +274,11 @@ import json
 
 from ansible.module_utils.basic import AnsibleModule
 from ansible.module_utils.six.moves.urllib.parse import urlencode
-from ansible.module_utils._text import to_native
+from ansible.module_utils._text import to_native, to_text
 from ansible.module_utils.urls import fetch_url
 
 
+
 class CloudflareAPI(object):
 
     cf_api_endpoint = 'https://api.cloudflare.com/client/v4'
@@ -369,9 +370,9 @@ class CloudflareAPI(object):
 
         if content:
             try:
-                result = json.loads(content)
-            except json.JSONDecodeError:
-                error_msg += "; Failed to parse API response: {0}".format(content)
+                result = json.loads(to_text(content, errors='surrogate_then_strict'))
+            except (json.JSONDecodeError, UnicodeError) as e:
+                error_msg += "; Failed to parse API response with error {0}: {1}".format(to_native(e), content)
 
         # received an error status but no data with details on what failed
         if (info['status'] not in [200,304]) and (result is None):