Subj : Cloudflare outlines what caused major outage - but says a hack wa
To   : All
From : TechnologyDaily
Date : Wed Nov 19 2025 10:30:07

Cloudflare outlines what caused major outage - but says a hack wasn't to blame

Date:
Wed, 19 Nov 2025 10:27:28 +0000

Description:
Cloudflare says its November 2025 outage was caused by a system error.

FULL STORY
======================================================================Cloudfla
re admits it caused its own outage  it wasnt a cyberattack Fluctuating error 
reports made the problem challenging to identify at first The unacceptable 
outage did lead to some learning opportunities 

Cloudflare has shared more details about its November 18 outage  its worst 
outage since 2019  confirming that it wasnt the result of an attack or any 
other type of malicious activity. 

In a blog post , company co-founder and CEO Matthew Prince explained a 
database permission change triggered the system to generate a feature file 
that doubled in size, before it propagated to all the machines on its 
network, causing the software to fail. 

Because Cloudflare was able to identify what had gone wrong, normal operation 
resumed a little over three hours after the outage, with full recovery a few 
hours later. Cloudflare confirms outage wasnt an attack 

Core traffic was largely flowing as normal by 14:30, Prince wrote, as 
confirmed by a chat showing a big drop-off in 5xx error HTTP status codes 
right around that time. 

However, Cloudflare did need to dig a little deeper to discovery what exactly 
was going on due to a pretty high fluctuation range of error reports. This 
was because the problematic file was being generated every five minutes. 

As well as returning HTTP 5xx errors, we observed significant increases in 
latency of responses from our CDN during the impact period, Prince added, 
noting that large amounts of CPU were being used across debugging and 
observability. 

Cloudflares status page also went down during the attack  a page thats 
totally independent of Cloudflares infrastructure. Apparently, this was 
little more than a coincidence. 

Nevertheless, the outage did at least serve as a learning opportunity for 
Cloudflare, which now promises to enable more global kill switches for 
features. 

An outage like today is unacceptable, Prince concluded, before putting a 
slightly positive spin on it: When we've had outages in the past it's always 
led to us building new, more resilient systems. 

 Follow TechRadar on Google News and add us as a preferred source to get our 
expert news, reviews, and opinion in your feeds. Make sure to click the 
Follow button! 

 And of course you can also follow TechRadar on TikTok for news, reviews, 
unboxings in video form, and get regular updates from us on WhatsApp too.



======================================================================
Link to news story:
https://www.techradar.com/pro/cloudflare-outlines-what-caused-major-outage-but
-says-a-hack-wasnt-to-blame


--- Mystic BBS v1.12 A49 (Linux/64)
 * Origin: tqwNet Technology News (1337:1/100)

.