this post was submitted on 18 Nov 2025
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Widespread Cloudflare outage blamed on mysterious traffic spike (arstechnica.com)
submitted 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) by tonytins@pawb.social to c/technology@lemmy.world
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A Cloudflare spokesperson told Ars that the cloud services provider saw “a spike in unusual traffic to one of Cloudflare’s services,” which “caused some traffic passing through Cloudflare’s network to experience errors.”

“We do not yet know the cause of the spike in unusual traffic,” the spokesperson said. “We are all hands on deck to make sure all traffic is served without errors. After that, we will turn our attention to investigating the cause of the unusual spike in traffic.”

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[–] eRac@lemmings.world 2 points 7 hours ago

It was actually the system Cloudflare uses to catch and block bots that went haywire.

They had a fake database you could query that would pull content from a bunch of different shard databases. They updated the config so that systems querying it could see the shards in addition to the main dummy DB. The tool that pulled data out of it assumed that it could only see the dummy, however, so it just asked for everything when it pulled a report to pass to the filtering system.

The filtering system assumed the report it received would be properly formed and crashed if it got one that was malformed.