this post was submitted on 19 Nov 2025
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352
Cloudfare outage post mortem (blog.cloudflare.com)
submitted 23 hours 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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[–] MonkderVierte@lemmy.zip 42 points 18 hours ago* (last edited 18 hours ago) (2 children)

Meaning, internal error, like the other two prior.

Almost like one big provider with 99.9999% availability is worse than 10 with maybe 99.9%

[–] Jason2357@lemmy.ca 12 points 12 hours ago

Except, if you chose the wrong 1 of that 10 and your company is the only one down for a day, you get fire-bombed. If "TEH INTERNETS ARE DOWN" and your website is down for a day, no one even calls you.

[–] jj4211@lemmy.world 9 points 13 hours ago (1 children)

Note that this outage by itself, based on their chart, was kicking out errors over the span of about 8 hours. This one outage would have almost entirely blown their downtown allowance under 99.9% availability criteria.

If one big provider actually provided 99.9999%, that would be 30 seconds of all outages over a typical year. Not even long enough for people to generally be sure there was an 'outage' as a user. That wouldn't be bad at all.