Cloudflare outlines what caused major outage - but says a hack wasn't to blame

• Cloudflare admits it caused its own outage – it wasn’t a cyberattack
• Fluctuating error reports made the problem challenging to identify at first
• The “unacceptable” outage did lead to some learning opportunities

Cloudflare has shared more details about its November 18 outage – its worst outage since 2019 – confirming that it wasn’t the result of an attack or any other type of malicious activity.

In a blog post, company co-founder and CEO Matthew Prince explained a database permission change triggered the system to generate a ‘feature file’ that doubled in size, before it propagated to all the machines on its network, causing the software to fail.

Because Cloudflare was able to identify what had gone wrong, normal operation resumed a little over three hours after the outage, with full recovery a few hours later.