Cloudflare Outage Was Not Caused By A Cyber Attack

Cloudflare wrongly suspected that nan wide outage that took galore websites offline connected November 18 was caused by a DDoS attack, nan company’s CEO has admitted. In his blog post that breaks down what happened, however, Matthew Prince explained that aft realizing their mistake, his squad was capable to hole nan issue. “The rumor was not caused, straight aliases indirectly, by a cyber onslaught aliases malicious activity of immoderate kind,” he wrote. It was alternatively caused by a alteration to its database systems’ permissions, which led to an rumor pinch a record utilized by its Bot Management system.

The company’s Bot Management strategy uses a instrumentality learning exemplary to people bots for each petition they make erstwhile they crawl Cloudflare’s network. Its clients trust connected those bot scores to determine whether to let aliases to artifact circumstantial bots from accessing their websites. One nan uses of having bot scores is being capable to artifact AI companies’ bots truthful they can’t usage a website’s contented to train their LLMs. In July, Cloudflare launched an research called “pay per crawl,” which allows website owners to fto an AI bot crawl their pages if they get paid for access.

Prince said nan exemplary relies connected a “feature” configuration record to make a prediction connected whether a bot petition was automated aliases not. The characteristic record is refreshed each fewer minutes, and a alteration successful nan underlying system generating that record caused a alteration successful its size that triggered nan error. “As a result, HTTP 5xx correction codes were returned by nan halfway proxy strategy that handles postulation processing for our customers, for immoderate postulation that depended connected nan bots module,” Prince wrote.

This caller arena has been Cloudflare’s worst outage successful years. The institution said it hasn’t had an outage that has “caused nan mostly of halfway postulation to extremity flowing done [its] network” since 2019. Prince apologized for nan rumor connected behalf of his team.