Just about everybody who was online yesterday will have noticed something was wrong with ye olde internet. A major issue at network service provider Cloudflare brought down everything from and X and ChatGPT to order screens at McDonald's restaurants. Now Cloudflare has posted a full explanation of the outage and it turns out the problem was entirely internal and self inflicted.
Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince's mea culpa was remarkably unambiguous. Up front and literally in bold, he kicks off with the following statement:
The problem began at 11:20 UTC and Cloudflare says it had correctly identified the issue, stopped the propagation of the larger-than-expected feature file and got core traffic "largely flowing as normal" by 14:30. By 17:06, "all systems at Cloudflare were functioning as normal."
Cloudflare says the event was the company's worse outage since 2019. Several mitigations are being put in place to prevent a repeat, including more global kill switches for features and eliminating the ability for core dumps or other error reports to overwhelm system resources.
Wrapping up his blog post, Prince concludes, "an outage like today is unacceptable. We've architected our systems to be highly resilient to failure to ensure traffic will always continue to flow. When we've had outages in the past it's always led to us building new, more resilient systems. On behalf of the entire team at Cloudflare, I would like to apologize for the pain we caused the Internet today."
If you're interested in the finer details, Prince's blog post is absolutely forensic about every aspect of the problem and Cloudflare's relevant systems and practices. It's an intriguing insight into how a very important part of the internet works and the impact of having large parts of the modern information world reliant on a single company.
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