Major Cloudflare Outage Was Down to a Botched Update File

The recent Cloudflare outage that took half the internet with it wasn't caused by some major new DDoS attack or a socially engineered hack of the company servers. Instead, it was triggered by a botched update. Designed to improve the efficiency of Cloudflare's server infrastructure, the update instead caused a file to double in size unexpectedly, causing website after website to fall flat on its face.

For tech writers like myself, it was mad to see so many of the usual publications I haunt go down during the outage, but major mainstream services were affected, too. ChatGPT went down, as did Uber, McDonald's, Twitter/X, and long-time esports king, League of Legends.

And it was all because of one file. Initially, Cloudflare analysts and internet commentators claimed the snafu was likely caused by a DDoS attack—potentially because Micorosft's Azure had been hit by one mere ...