In a digital drama that sounds like a Silicon Valley fever dream, Cloudflare managed to spectacularly break much of the internet with what can only be described as a digital hiccup.

The tech world was sent into a tailspin when a seemingly innocent file suddenly doubled in size and caused widespread chaos across their network. Think of it like a tech version of a random house party that suddenly spirals out of control.

The Digital Disaster Unfolds

Here’s the tea: Cloudflare has a bot management system with a limit of 200 machine learning features. When a “bad” file with more than 200 features spread across their servers, the system essentially had a meltdown. The result? A tsunami of 5xx error HTTP status codes that made websites across the internet go dark.

Behind the Scenes of the Tech Catastrophe

What makes this outage truly wild is how it happened. The problematic file was being generated every five minutes by a database cluster, creating a digital Russian roulette where every five minutes there was a chance of generating either a good or bad configuration file. Talk about tech drama!

Learning from Digital Chaos

Cloudflare’s team ultimately solved the problem by manually inserting a known good file and forcing a restart of their core proxy. They’ve committed to preventing future incidents by hardening their configuration file intake and creating more robust kill switches.

While they can’t promise never to have another massive outage, they’re committed to building more resilient systems. Because in the tech world, what doesn’t crash you makes you stronger - or at least, less likely to break the internet.