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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[–] SinTan1729@programming.dev 4 points 23 hours ago* (last edited 23 hours ago) (1 children)

I hope you're joking. If anything, Rust makes error handling easier by returning them as values using the Result monad. As someone else pointed out, they literally used unwrap in their code, which basically means "panic if this ever returns error". You don't do this unless it's impossible to handle the error inside the program, or if panicking is the behavior you want due to e.g. security reasons.

Even as an absolute amateur, whenever I post any Rust to the public, the first thing I do is get rid of unwrap as much as possible, unless I intentionally want the application to crash. Even then, I use expect instead of unwrap to have some logging. This is definitely the work of some underpaid intern.

Also, Python is sloooowwww.

[–] panda_abyss@lemmy.ca 2 points 18 hours ago (1 children)

I was joking, but oof it did not go over well.

[–] SinTan1729@programming.dev 2 points 9 hours ago (1 children)

Ah that makes sense. To be fair tho, there's a lot of unwarranted hate towards Rust so it can be hard to tell.

[–] panda_abyss@lemmy.ca 2 points 5 hours ago

I should bite the bullet and learn it.

I decided to learn zig recently, it feels like crafting artisanal software, which is what I liked C for. But it’s kinda janky in that each point version major features come and go (see io and async).

There’s a place for engineering software which is what rust seems great at. Definitely seems like a tool I could/would use as rust is taking over many of my tool workflows.