Cloudflare Apologizes For Massive Outage & Details What Went Horribly Wrong

An event at Cloudflare that crippled large portions of the internet yesterday was not caused by a cyber attack or malicious activity, either directly or indirectly, the company confirmed in a blog. If that's the case, then what caused all the ruckus? Turns out it was a change in permissions to one of Cloudflare's databases that triggered an unfortunate series of events.

Following the change in permissions, the database began outputting multiple entries into a so-called 'feature file' employed by Cloudflare's Bot Management system. In doing so, the feature file unexpectedly doubled in size and was then propagated to every machine in Cloudflare's network.

"The software running on these machines to route traffic across our network reads this feature file to keep our Bot Management system up to date with ever changing threats. The software had a limit on the size of the feature file that ...