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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