What caused the Cloudflare outage on November 18?

The outage was caused by a change in Cloudflare's database systems permissions affecting a file used by its Bot Management system, not a cyberattack.

Did a DDoS attack cause the Cloudflare outage?

No, Cloudflare's CEO confirmed the widespread outage was not caused by a DDoS attack or any malicious activity.

How did Cloudflare's Bot Management system contribute to the outage?

A change in a configuration file size used by the Bot Management system triggered an error, leading to HTTP 5xx codes for client traffic.

Home / Technology / Cloudflare Blames Database Glitch for Site Outage

Cloudflare Blames Database Glitch for Site Outage

19 Nov

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Summary

Cloudflare wrongly suspected a DDoS attack caused the outage.
A change in database systems permissions caused the widespread disruption.
The error impacted website traffic processing for clients.

Cloudflare Blames Database Glitch for Site Outage

Cloudflare has revealed that a significant outage on November 18, which impacted numerous websites, was not the result of a cyberattack as initially suspected. CEO Matthew Prince clarified that a misconfiguration within the company's database systems permissions was the root cause.

This error affected a crucial file used by Cloudflare's Bot Management system, which scores bots for AI training and access control. The malfunction led to widespread HTTP 5xx error codes, disrupting traffic processing for many of Cloudflare's clients.

The company described the incident as its most severe outage since 2019. Prince apologized for the disruption, assuring users that the issue has since been resolved and was not caused by malicious activity.

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