Cloudflare’s Comedy of Errors: How a Simple Update Brought the Internet to Its Knees
Cloudflare’s worst outage in six years was caused by a runaway database permissions update. Like a digital version of “Whoops! I did it again,” the update sent their Bot Management system into a spin, crashing the network for 6 hours. CEO Matthew Prince confirmed it wasn’t a cyberattack—just a case of “too much of a good thing.”
Hot Take:
When a company named “Cloudflare” experiences a massive outage, you can’t help but wonder if they should change their name to “Cloudfail” for a day. After all, when your company is synonymous with keeping the internet afloat, it’s a little awkward when you accidentally sink the ship with a routine database update. Oopsie daisy!
Key Points:
- Cloudflare had its worst outage in 6 years, lasting nearly 6 hours.
- The outage was caused by a database access change, not a cyberattack.
- The issue created an oversized configuration file, crashing the network.
- Core traffic was restored by 14:30 UTC, with full service by 17:06 UTC.
- Previous major outages occurred in June and October of the same year.
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