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Cloudflare Outage Briefly Knocks Major Sites Offline After Internal Configuration Error

Cloudflare attributes the incident to a database permissions change that generated an oversized Bot Management file.

Overview

  • The disruption began around 11:20 UTC on Nov. 18 with widespread 5xx responses as core proxies failed, presenting “internal server error” pages to users.
  • Cloudflare says the permissions change doubled the size of a Bot Management feature file beyond software limits, causing faulty configurations to propagate every five minutes.
  • Major services including ChatGPT, X, Spotify and Uber saw access problems, and Downdetector both recorded surges in reports and was hindered itself.
  • Cloudflare’s status and support portals were intermittently unreachable, and WARP access was disabled in London during repairs, according to CNBC.
  • Core traffic was largely restored by 14:30 UTC with full recovery by 17:06 UTC, and Cloudflare shares fell about 4.3% during the incident, according to 36Kr.