This study investigates the evolution of the backflow regions in wall-bounded flows which is a rare phenomenon induced by the large-scale motions in the viscous wall region following Chen et al. (J. Fluid Mech., vol. 966, 2023, A38) which revealed the unclear process and cause of the splitting, merging, and wall-detaching behaviours of the backflow regions. The backflow region can go through multiple life cycles of growth and decay which was linked to the regeneration in spanwise vortices in vortex clusters, also known as hairpin packets. Observations in this study show extensive evidence of the backflow regions being induced underneath strong spanwise rotations as the heads of hairpin vortices including cane- and arch-shaped asymmetric vortices. The low-speed structure is bounded between the quasi-streamwise vortices as the legs of the hairpins, similar to the structure organisation depicted in Adrian et al. (J. Fluid Mech., vol. 422, 2000, pp. 1–54). The growth and decay of the backflow regions in their life cycles follow the development of the associated hairpin vortices. It is observed that multiple backflow regions can occur in streamwise alignment under clustered vortices where the new backflow region develops downstream of the existing one. The observations match the conceptual model for the large-scale motions and hairpin packets wrapped around the low-speed structure attached to the wall where its tail can be strong enough to cause flow reversal underneath the heads of the trailing vortices in the cluster.