DDoS Suspected, Internal Bug Found: Cloudflare Outage Caused by Bot Management Config File

Cloudflare has described the outage as the company’s most severe service disruption in years, clarifying that it was not a network attack but an internal misdiagnosis. According to Cloudflare, the disruption stemmed from a change in permissions within an internal database system that corrupted a critical file used by its Bot Management system.

An extensive technical breakdown explained that the Bot Management platform relies on a configuration file containing “features” that is regenerated and updated every few minutes, and the failure occurred when a modification to the underlying generation mechanism changed the size of this file. The incident led to HTTP 5xx error codes from the core proxy system that handles traffic processing for customers, for any traffic that depended on the bots module. The company stated that it had not experienced an outage capable of halting a majority of core traffic since 2019.