The Cloudflare Outage May Be a Security Roadmap

An intermittent outage at Cloudflare on Tuesday briefly knocked many of the Internet’s top destinations offline, with some customers able to pivot away from the platform to keep sites reachable. According to Cloudflare’s postmortem, the disruption was not caused by a cyberattack or malicious activity, but was triggered by a change to one of its database systems’ permissions that caused a larger-than-expected feature file to be propagated across the network.

The outage period prompted some organisations to bypass Cloudflare for several hours, raising questions about what was turned off or bypassed and how those changes were approved. Aaron Turner of IANS Research notes that the period could be used to review WAF logs and understand how well defences perform without Cloudflare, while Nicole Scott of Replica Cyber described the incident as a live tabletop exercise for route-finding around a control plane.

The piece also highlights that roughly 20 percent of websites use Cloudflare and that dependence on AWS and Azure can create a single point of failure during such outages.