Cloudflare executive apologizes for global outage triggered by internal bug

Cloudflare CTO Dane Knecht apologized for the major outage on November 18 that took numerous sites and services offline. He stressed that the incident was caused by an internal software bug, not a cyberattack.

According to the company, a hidden flaw in the bot-mitigation module was triggered by a routine configuration update, causing a cascade of network degradation. Users worldwide experienced failures accessing Cloudflare-protected sites as well as issues with Access and WARP. Even Downdetector went down temporarily.

Cloudflare called the impact and response time “unacceptable” and stated that fixes were deployed around 14:42 UTC, after which services began to recover.

Experts note that the incident highlights the risks of internet centralization: a single provider’s failure can have global repercussions. Cloudflare is preparing a full post-mortem detailing the root cause and steps to prevent similar outages.