Their global failure paralyzed half of the world’s Internet. The company revealed what happened

As a result of the Cloudflare outage,many websites around the world experienced performance issues. In a statement,the company “apologized to all Internet users,” noting that it was “unacceptable.” “We know we failed,” the statement concluded.

On Tuesday,November 18 at 12:20 Cloudflare’s network experienced severe outages preventing the delivery of basic network traffic. Internet users trying to access many websites around the world saw an error page indicating an outage. The pages that went down included: Chat GPT,X (former Twitter),Canvy,Perplexity and many Polish media.

It is ironic that problems were encountered by the Downdetector website,where Internet users usually check and report problems with the functioning of various platforms. Users saw,among others: message: “unblock challenges.cloudflare.com to continue.” As Cloudflare stressed,the issue was not caused,directly or indirectly,by a cyberattack or any malicious activity. It was caused by a change in the permissions of one of the database systems.

Cloudflare issued a statement regarding the outage that disabled websites. We know the reasons

This caused the database to send multiple entries to the “features file” used by Cloudflare’s bot management system. As a result,the size of this function file has doubled. It was larger than expected,so it was sent to all the machines that make up the company’s network. This caused the software to crash. Cloudflare initially misinterpreted that the problem occurred as a result of a massive DDoS attack.

The websites worked for some time,only to encounter accessibility problems again. At 15:30,network traffic was mostly normal,and at 18:06 all Cloudflare systems were functioning normally. “We apologize to our customers and all internet users for the inconvenience caused. Given Cloudflare’s importance in the internet ecosystem,any failure of any of our systems is unacceptable,” the company stressed.

They are beating their chests after a global network outage. “Unacceptable. We know we failed.”

According to Cloudflare,“the fact that their network was unable to direct traffic for a period of time is very painful for every member of the team.” “We know we failed today,” the statement said. Cloudflare said it will take action to prevent similar outages in the future. The company admitted that it had had various failures in recent years that resulted in the unavailability of websites,but this one was the most serious since 2019.