On Tuesday, a large portion of the internet went dark after a Cloudflare system failure temporarily took major websites offline. Platforms affected included ChatGPT, X, and Downdetector, leaving users unable to access these services for several hours.
Cloudflare has now clarified that the outage was caused by a technical error, not a cyberattack. Matthew Prince, co-founder and CEO of the company, published a blog post explaining the root cause of the disruption. He confirmed that the issue originated from the company’s Bot Management system, which determines how automated crawlers interact with websites on its network.
The system is designed to protect websites from sudden traffic surges and DDoS attacks. However, a permissions change in the database behind the Bot Management engine caused the system to malfunction. The company stated that the problem was unrelated to Cloudflare’s AI safeguards, DNS, or cybersecurity concerns.
At the center of the failure was a machine learning model that assigns bot scores to incoming traffic. A recent change to ClickHouse queries created duplicate rows in a configuration file. This caused the file to exceed memory limits, leading to a failure in Cloudflare’s core proxy system.
The outage meant that websites using Cloudflare’s bot rules mistakenly blocked legitimate users while allowing some false bots through. Sites that did not rely on these rules continued to function normally.
While Cloudflare’s AI Labyrinth system—designed to control rule-breaking crawlers—was not involved, the incident highlights the internet’s heavy dependence on centralized infrastructure. Similar outages have recently affected Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services.
Cloudflare has outlined four immediate steps to prevent a repeat incident. Although the company did not provide full details, it acknowledged that interconnected systems make occasional outages possible despite stronger safeguards.
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The incident serves as a reminder of how critical Cloudflare is to global internet traffic, with the company managing roughly 20 percent of worldwide web traffic.
