Many internet users woke up on Tuesday to widespread connectivity issues across major platforms after a Cloudflare outage triggered failures on services including ChatGPT, Uber, and X. The company says the disruption stemmed from a routine configuration update that exposed a dormant flaw in its bot-mitigation system.
UPDATE 7:15 PM: In a blog post Tuesday evening, Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince called it the company’s most significant outage since 2019. Initial internal reviews pointed to a potential DDoS attack, but Prince confirmed the failure “was not caused, directly or indirectly, by a cyber attack or malicious activity of any kind.”
According to Prince, a permissions change within one of the company’s database systems led the database to generate multiple entries in a “feature file” used for Cloudflare’s Bot Management tools. The file unexpectedly doubled in size and was then pushed across Cloudflare’s global network.
The routing software used across those machines relies on the feature file to keep bot-detection rules current. But the program had a size limit lower than the expanded file, Prince said, causing it to crash repeatedly and take down network traffic handling with it.