Around the same time, Cloudflare’s chief technology officer Dane Knecht explained that a latent bug was responsible in an apologetic X post.
“In short, a latent bug in a service underpinning our bot mitigation capability started to crash after a routine configuration change we made. That cascaded into a broad degradation to our network and other services. This was not an attack,” Knecht wrote, referring to a bug that went undetected in testing and has not caused a failure.
Indirectly, this was. He said this was a bug in their recent tool that allows sites to block AI crawlers that caused the outages. It’s a relatively new tool released in the last few months, so it makes sense it might be buggy as the rush to stop the AI DoS attacks has been pertinent.