Cloudflare, one of the biggest DDoS and security providers on the internet, suffered a major outage yesterday, knocking out several major websites, including X, OpenAI, and even some McDonald’s branches across the globe. Its chief technology officer has since apologized for the massive error, while its co-founder, Matthew Prince, has since released the details of the cause of the outage on the company blog.
Since Cloudflare is a web security outfit that protects a big chunk of the internet from DDoS and other similar network intrusions, one of the first thoughts of the company was that it was under attack. In fact, Microsoft released a report of a record-breaking DDoS attack against its servers on the same day that the Cloudflare issue happened. However, the company realized that it was actually caused by a configuration error after further investigation.
“The issue was not caused, directly or indirectly, by a cyber attack or malicious activity of any kind. Instead, it was triggered by a change to one of our database systems’ permissions, which caused the database to output multiple entries into a 'feature file' used by our Bot Management system,” Prince wrote in the blog. “That feature file, in turn, doubled in size. The larger-than-expected feature file was then propagated to all the machines that make up our network.”
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