Cloudflare apologises for major outage affecting websites and social media

Cloudflare has issued an apology following a massive outage that affected several websites and social media sites on Tuesday. The company clarified that the issue was not due to a cyber attack but rather a technical failure in its database systems.

"Cloudflare's network began experiencing significant failures to deliver core network traffic. This showed up to Internet users trying to access our customers' sites as an error page indicating a failure within Cloudflare's network," the service provider said in a statement.

It explained that a cyber attack did not cause the issue nor did it believe there were any malicious links.

"Instead, it was triggered by a change to one of our database systems' permissions which caused the database to output multiple entries into a “feature file” used by our Bot Management system. That feature file, in turn, doubled in size. The larger-than-expected feature file was then propagated to all the machines that make up our network," Cloudflare stated.

"The software running on these machines to route traffic across our network reads this feature file to keep our Bot Management system up to date with ever-changing threats. The software had a limit on the size of the feature file that was below its doubled size. That caused the software to fail," Cloudflare added.

The service provider said it was able to stop the propagation of its larger-than-expected feature file and replace it with an earlier version of the file.

"We are sorry for the impact to our customers and to the Internet in general. Given Cloudflare's importance in the Internet ecosystem any outage of any of our systems is unacceptable. That there was a period of time where our network was not able to route traffic is deeply painful to every member of our team. We know we let you down today," Cloudflare said.