Cloudflare Explains How Configuration Change Took Down 20 Percent of the Internet

Cloudflare suffered a major outage after an internal permissions change caused its Bot Management system to generate an oversized feature file that repeatedly broke proxy services. The faulty file was circulated across the network, triggering hours of failures that initially resembled a DDoS attack. Cloudflare halted the bad file, restored a stable version, and rebooted services to bring traffic back to normal.