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Cloudfare outage post mortem (blog.cloudflare.com)
submitted 4 months ago by homura1650@lemmy.world to c/technology@lemmy.world
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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.

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[-] echodot@feddit.uk 2 points 4 months ago

So I work in the IT department of a pretty large company. One of the things that we do on a regular basis is staged updates, so we'll get a small number of computers and we'll update the software on them to the latest version or whatever. Then we leave it for about a week, and if the world doesn't end we update the software onto the next group and then the next and then the next until everything is upgraded. We don't just slap it onto production infrastructure and then go to the pub.

But apparently our standards are slightly higher than that of an international organisation who's whole purpose is cyber security.

[-] floquant@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 4 months ago

Their motivation is that that file has to change rapidly to respond to threats. If a new botnet pops up and starts generating a lot of malicious traffic, they can't just let it run for a week

[-] echodot@feddit.uk 1 points 4 months ago

There are technical solutions to this. You update half your servers, and then if they die you just disconnect them from the network while you fix them and then have your own unaffected servers take up the load. Now yes, this doesn't get a fixout quickly, but if you update kills your entire system, you're not going to get the fix out quickly anyway.

this post was submitted on 19 Nov 2025
9 points (100.0% liked)

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