Cloudflare Blames Outage on Internal Configuration Error

Cloudflare has blamed an outage that disrupted major websites and services for several hours on an internal configuration error. The incident began at 11:20 UTC on Tuesday and affected sites such as X, Uber, Canva and ChatGPT, among others, initially leading some to suspect a DDoS attack.

According to Cloudflare founder and CEO Matthew Prince, the issue stemmed from a change to one of the database systems’ permissions, which caused the database to output multiple entries into a feature file used by the Bot Management system. The resulting file growth overwhelmed the system, producing 5xx errors as the distribution of the bad configuration file across the network continued until the problem was halted and a good file reintroduced.

Cloudflare had mostly resolved the incident by 14:30 UTC, with all systems functioning normally by 17:06 UTC, and Prince apologised, saying that any outage of their systems is unacceptable.