The Cloudflare Outage EXPLAINED

Key Takeaways

Almost a third of the internet went down yesterday. Here's what happened. Around 11:30 a.m., people started noticing that their apps and websites just stopped working. And it wasn't just one website. It was like almost all of them. 11:48 Cloudflare reports that it's experiencing service outages. Cloudflare is used by a lot of tech companies. One of their most popular services is the content delivery network or reverse proxy, which helps deliver websites faster and protects from attacks. But about an hour and a half later, they identified the issue. But what happened? One of their databases had a permission change, which caused the database to duplicate entries into something called a feature file, which is used to protect your websites from bots. This was then deployed to all machines in their global network. And the software used on their servers used this file to keep up to date with attacks, but had a size limit. But the database that changed permissions pushed that way over the limit, causing everything to crash. And so about an hour later, they stopped the bad file and then eventually service started recovering again. This was one of the worst outages since 2019. And it's awesome that Cloudflare was able to do a postmortem about it, saying what happened and why it