A lot of people are getting this wrong. Cloudflare’s system is distributed the way it is to make DDoS attacks against individuals hosts and routes much more difficult. The goal is to block the traffic closer to the source to protect downstream routes. This morning it arguably worked as intended. The outage was around 30 minutes, and there was still intermittent connectivity during that time. Cloudflare didn’t collapse, it was struggling to separate legitimate traffic from DOS traffic, and throwing circui breakers and isolating nodes, because it was such a massive attack.
except you’re getting it wrong, because it wasn’t an attack, according to Cloudflare. they fucked up a config file on one of their systems and that caused a cascading effect of failures in one system after another.
it was quite literally not working as they intended.
A lot of people are getting this wrong. Cloudflare’s system is distributed the way it is to make DDoS attacks against individuals hosts and routes much more difficult. The goal is to block the traffic closer to the source to protect downstream routes. This morning it arguably worked as intended. The outage was around 30 minutes, and there was still intermittent connectivity during that time. Cloudflare didn’t collapse, it was struggling to separate legitimate traffic from DOS traffic, and throwing circui breakers and isolating nodes, because it was such a massive attack.
except you’re getting it wrong, because it wasn’t an attack, according to Cloudflare. they fucked up a config file on one of their systems and that caused a cascading effect of failures in one system after another.
it was quite literally not working as they intended.
Most of the reporting I have seen suggests a massive traffic spike. Do you have some more information about the config file?
https://blog.cloudflare.com/18-november-2025-outage/