Cloudflare outage… what on earth happened today?Solved

Bro… I refreshed our login page 12 times thinking the browser was trolling me. When even Google searches were slow, I knew something cosmic was happening.

I checked one of the anime sites I visit occasionally and even that vanished. My soul left my body. I thought the authorities finally cleaned the whole internet. Then I realised… Cloudflare. Of course. Even the shady corners rely on enterprise CDNs now.

Happened to a friend of mine too. Her manga reader app showed “server not found” and she immediately assumed the publisher sued the entire website into dust. Nope. Just cloudflare’s routing taking a five-minute power nap. These dependency chains are wild.

SRE perspective here. Cloudflare’s post-mortem shows the root cause was a huge Bot Management configuration file, caused by a permission change in their database. When that file got pushed to servers everywhere, the traffic-routing software hit an internal limit and started failing. Once Dns and traffic routing go wrong at the source, everything downstream just looks broken. 

Downdetector going down during the outage will never not be funny. The “site that shows things are down” also being down is poetic.

Kind of surreal how one incorrect configuration deep inside Cloudflare managed to take down everything ranging from the biggest platforms to small community sites. It’s a good reminder that even when your servers are healthy, if the front door layer breaks, nothing gets through.