Shamino
November 18, 2025, 11:37pm
2
Yeah. I saw this this morning, when several of my daily web-comics failed to load. Oddly enough, I didn’t see any problem with TidBITS. I guess the timing was just right for that.
Here’s a report from the Cloudflare blog: Cloudflare outage on November 18, 2025
Of note, to those who don’t want to read the whole thing:
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.