this post was submitted on 19 Nov 2025
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356
Cloudfare outage post mortem (blog.cloudflare.com)
submitted 1 day ago by homura1650@lemmy.world to c/technology@lemmy.world
53 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

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. 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.

The software running on these machines to route traffic across our network reads this feature file to keep our Bot Management system up to date with ever changing threats. The software had a limit on the size of the feature file that was below its doubled size. That caused the software to fail.

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[–] dan@upvote.au 10 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

This can happen regardless of language.

The actual issue is that they should be canarying changes. Push them to a small percentage of servers, and ensure nothing bad happens before pushing them more broadly. At my workplace, config changes are automatically tested on one server, then an entire rack, then an entire cluster, before fully rolling out. The rollout process watches the core logs for things like elevated HTTP 5xx errors.