Widespread Cloudflare outage blamed on mysterious traffic spike
Submitted 2 weeks ago by tonytins@pawb.social to technology@lemmy.world
Comments
gravitywell@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
vacuumflower@lemmy.sdf.org 2 weeks ago
Buying a car is pretty capitalist.
I’m not envious and I like the thought of some places on the planet having it normal for one family to have few cars, but - in certain places where capitalism has already been disrupted a few times in history, like Moscow, Russia where I, eh, reside, am headquartered, dwell, roam, … - and those places are richer than much of the world, - people would think the guy from the screenshot doesn’t have many reasons to try disrupting it.
NatakuNox@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Wooooosssshhhhh
locahosr443@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Amazon is now saving Americans from the crippling debt most of them seem to get into to drive a shiny box… I wasn’t expecting that.
JohnnyCanuck@lemmy.ca 2 weeks ago
My bad, I started downloading The Lord of the Rings movies - Extended Edition. Sorry!
tonytins@pawb.social 2 weeks ago
How many times have I told not to download movies or games in the middle of the day? You’ll tie up the phone lines.
cyrano@piefed.social 2 weeks ago
dharmacurious@slrpnk.net 2 weeks ago
I had fully forgotten the phrase “you’ll tie up the phone line!” And I just had a nam style flashback of sneaking internet time during the day when my mom was at work, and praying that no one tried to call
ooterness@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Ten movies streaming across that, that Internet, and what happens to your own personal Internet? I just the other day got… an Internet was sent by my staff at 10 o’clock in the morning on Friday. I got it yesterday. Why? Because it got tangled up with all these things going on the Internet commercially. They want to deliver vast amounts of information over the Internet. And again, the Internet is not something that you just dump something on. It’s not a big truck. It’s a series of tubes. And if you don’t understand, those tubes can be filled and if they are filled, when you put your message in, it gets in line and it’s going to be delayed by anyone that puts into that tube enormous amounts of material, enormous amounts of material.
velummortis@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 weeks ago
Hey me too!
Treczoks@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Which AI scraper went rogue this time?
VieuxQueb@lemmy.ca 2 weeks ago
Mabe the new bezos Prometheus?
ggppjj@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Gemini 3 was released today : 👀
eRac@lemmings.world 2 weeks ago
It was actually the system Cloudflare uses to catch and block bots that went haywire.
They had a fake database you could query that would pull content from a bunch of different shard databases. They updated the config so that systems querying it could see the shards in addition to the main dummy DB. The tool that pulled data out of it assumed that it could only see the dummy, however, so it just asked for everything when it pulled a report to pass to the filtering system.
The filtering system assumed the report it received would be properly formed and crashed if it got one that was malformed.
melroy@kbin.melroy.org 2 weeks ago
I hope more websites will move away from cloudflare. I could not access 90% of the web anymore. This is insane if just 1 company goes down, the whole internet is dead. The internet is broken!
mybuttnolie@sopuli.xyz 2 weeks ago
and it’s fucking annoying to check the box to “prove you’re a human” when trying to access almost any site. some days it will make me do it three times before letting me through
melroy@kbin.melroy.org 2 weeks ago
I understand the need for anti-bot or DDoS protection, but there are better and free options today. Like Anubis. So please, in the love of The Internet, move away from cloudflare. Ideally yesterday already.
modular950@lemmy.zip 2 weeks ago
next time you’re at bat against one of these, you may try moving less diligently / efficiently to the checkbox. overall, a slowed and less exact approach. I’ve not tested this enough to REALLY say it makes a difference, but in cases where I continually fail, going slower does seem to be the time I finally get through.
I find the same for the picture puzzles where you select images that match or apply to the posted context or whatever else the mission may be.
nyan@lemmy.cafe 2 weeks ago
It isn’t just annoying, it often breaks for people on less-popular browsers. Plus, it requires you to run Cloudflare’s Javascript. You think this outage was bad—what do you think would happen if someone slipped them a bit of malware?
tdawg@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
It’s almost like the internet is a public good that everyone should have access to
Blackdoomax@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
Internet is so fucked up and manipulated that people would be better without it.
Imgonnatrythis@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
Did I miss something? Is everyone downloading the Epstein files today?
themurphy@lemmy.ml 2 weeks ago
It’s very normal for countries to DDOS each other to test their limits, and if it could be incorporated in an attack.
And yes, of course the US is also testing this against other nations.
TomMasz@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Every DDoS that hits Cloudflare is bigger than the previous one. There’s bound to be one that they couldn’t instantly mitigate.
MigratingApe@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 weeks ago
Did Akamai, their competitor, ever blinked? (I don’t remember).
turmoil@feddit.org 2 weeks ago
This was a malfunction, not a DDoS attack. blog.cloudflare.com/18-november-2025-outage/
themurphy@lemmy.ml 2 weeks ago
Thanks mate, I edited my post for clarity.
ellen.kimble@piefed.social 2 weeks ago
Did someone google Google again?
ivanafterall@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Probably pointed one Google mirror at another Google mirror
verdantbanana@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
[deleted]breakingcups@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Absolute bonkers speculation and it’s wild that it got as many upvotes as downvotes.
There’s not even a hint of a suggestion that these two things would be related and it’d be a pretty stupid move to pull. This doesn’t hinder ICE that much and massively hinders many people all around the globe. Want to hinder communications? You’d jam ICE radios, not my muffin recipe website, (some) fediverse instances, and thousands of other websites.
Go outside, breath some air, recalibrate. This level of obsession is not good for you and won’t help the good causes you want to help either.
Acamon@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Was there a specific event that coincided with the blackout? I don’t know the details of current US events, just that they’re crazy and depressing.
db2@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
We probably won’t know for a while.
tonytins@pawb.social 2 weeks ago
Why DDoS Cloudflare when they could just pressure them directly like they did with BBC or Paramount? I know this administration isn’t exactly the brightest but that doesn’t seem like something they’d do.
k0e3@lemmy.ca 2 weeks ago
I thought OP was saying people are resisting ICE by DDoSing CloudFlare while you might be thinking ICE (therefore the administration) is attacking CloudFlare. Either way, it doesn’t make much sense lol
_cryptagion@anarchist.nexus 2 weeks ago
why is it whenever I see you post, it’s something batshit crazy with a bunch of downvotes?
ayyy@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
You always have the most bizarre stupid takes. The creativity is fascinating.
floquant@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 weeks ago
They suspended access to WARP from London during the outage, so I guess the traffic was originating/hitting that location
optissima@lemmy.ml 2 weeks ago
This is a much more positive view than mine, which is that AI corps are trying to make the rest of the internet less reliable to drive traffic to themselves
SoftestSapphic@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
“You see, half the internet went down because people used our services a little too much.”
Ok wtf???
How does cloudflare not have DDOS detection?
tonytins@pawb.social 2 weeks ago
That was based on anecdotal evidence, at the time. The real cause was Cloudflare shooting themselves in foot again because of a bad config file.
Kazumara@discuss.tchncs.de 2 weeks ago
The bad config file is somewhere in the middle of the chain of causality.
They changed database permissions, revealing a dormant bug in a database query, leading to config files being generated badly with duplicate lines, making them too large for intake by the bot detection service, which didn’t have good input validation and made the process panic instead, tearing down the bot detection service.
SoftestSapphic@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Lmao
arsCynic@lemmy.ml 2 weeks ago
Widespread Cloudflare outage blamed on mysterious traffic spike
Just like my 14-year-old self who “mysteriously” bricked his parents’ PC by totally SFW Web usage.
Strobelt@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
- Double clicks h4rdc0r3p0rn.exe right from limewire
arsCynic@lemmy.ml 2 weeks ago
Double clicks h4rdc0r3p0rn.exe right from limewire
Quickly followed by existential dread after realizing what I’ve done.
devfuuu@lemmy.world [bot] 2 weeks ago
Capitalists: “All lines must go up!” … (Traffic line goes up a little bit) Capitalists: “Not like that!”
GreenKnight23@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
translation: we don’t fucking know
Burninator05@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
No translation was really needed. They outright stated that they didnt know yet.
HazardousBanjo@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
When damn near every single essential service is built on the same infrastructure of tissue paper and chewed bubble gum, it shouldn’t surprise everyone when it collapses all at once.
postmateDumbass@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
All the people trying to cash out their Dr. Pepper points?
SHBI7368@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
It was google. Chatgpt and claudeai were down so i said oh hey let me try gemeni. What happened that day? By coincidence gemeni 3 came out
disconnectikacio@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Soviets?
mech@feddit.org 2 weeks ago
Aren’t spikes in unusual traffic the exact thing Cloudflare it’s supposed to protect you from?
brokenwing@discuss.tchncs.de 2 weeks ago
Task failed successfully.
BeatTakeshi@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Fission Mailed
the_crotch@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
They protected the endpoints. They just weren’t able to route traffic to them.
mech@feddit.org 2 weeks ago
From a Cloudflare customer’s point of view, I don’t care if my site is down from a DDOS or a Cloudflare outage, but the latter seems to happen more often.
Trigger2_2000@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
Yeah, but just one “unusual spike in traffic” - so it seems. /s
tdawg@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
ostensibly sure. But it’s like car insurance. People pay them no matter what so why bother doing what they promised?
oppy1984@lemdro.id 2 weeks ago
Traffic spikes, on the Internet? One in a million chance! Now tow cloudflare outside the environment and call it a day.