{"id":166229,"date":"2025-11-19T21:25:24","date_gmt":"2025-11-19T21:25:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/ushopwell.com\/ublog\/massive-cloudflare-outage-was-triggered-by-file-that-suddenly-doubled-in-size\/"},"modified":"2025-11-19T21:25:24","modified_gmt":"2025-11-19T21:25:24","slug":"massive-cloudflare-outage-was-triggered-by-file-that-suddenly-doubled-in-size","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ushopwell.com\/ublog\/massive-cloudflare-outage-was-triggered-by-file-that-suddenly-doubled-in-size\/","title":{"rendered":"Massive Cloudflare outage was triggered by file that suddenly doubled in size"},"content":{"rendered":"<div>\n<p>When a Cloudflare outage <a href=\"https:\/\/arstechnica.com\/tech-policy\/2025\/11\/widespread-cloudflare-outage-blamed-on-mysterious-traffic-spike\/\">disrupted large numbers<\/a> of websites and online services yesterday, the company initially thought it was hit by a \u201chyper-scale\u201d DDoS (distributed denial-of-service) attack.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cI worry this is the big botnet flexing,\u201d Cloudflare co-founder and CEO Matthew Prince wrote in an internal chat room yesterday, while he and others discussed whether Cloudflare was being hit by attacks from the prolific <a href=\"https:\/\/techcommunity.microsoft.com\/blog\/azureinfrastructureblog\/defending-the-cloud-azure-neutralized-a-record-breaking-15-tbps-ddos-attack\/4470422\">Aisuru botnet<\/a>. But upon further investigation, Cloudflare staff realized the problem had an internal cause: an important file had unexpectedly doubled in size and propagated across the network.<\/p>\n<p>This caused trouble for software that needs to read the file to maintain the Cloudflare <a href=\"https:\/\/www.cloudflare.com\/application-services\/products\/bot-management\/\">bot management system<\/a> that uses a machine learning model to protect against security threats. Cloudflare\u2019s core CDN, security services, and several other services were affected.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/arstechnica.com\/tech-policy\/2025\/11\/cloudflare-broke-much-of-the-internet-with-a-corrupted-bot-management-file\/\">Read full article<\/a><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/arstechnica.com\/tech-policy\/2025\/11\/cloudflare-broke-much-of-the-internet-with-a-corrupted-bot-management-file\/#comments\">Comments<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<p class=\"wpematico_credit\"><small>Powered by <a href=\"http:\/\/www.wpematico.com\" target=\"_blank\">WPeMatico<\/a><\/small><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>When a Cloudflare outage disrupted large numbers of websites and online services yesterday, the company initially thought it was hit by a \u201chyper-scale\u201d DDoS (distributed denial-of-service) attack. \u201cI worry this is the big botnet flexing,\u201d Cloudflare co-founder and CEO Matthew Prince wrote in an internal chat room yesterday, while he and others discussed whether Cloudflare was being hit by attacks from the prolific Aisuru botnet. But upon further investigation, Cloudflare&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[241],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-166229","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-technology"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v27.4 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>Massive Cloudflare outage was triggered by file that suddenly doubled in size - UshopWell.com<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/ushopwell.com\/ublog\/massive-cloudflare-outage-was-triggered-by-file-that-suddenly-doubled-in-size\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Massive Cloudflare outage was triggered by file that suddenly doubled in size - UshopWell.com\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"When a Cloudflare outage disrupted large numbers of websites and online services yesterday, the company initially thought it was hit by a \u201chyper-scale\u201d DDoS (distributed denial-of-service) attack. \u201cI worry this is the big botnet flexing,\u201d Cloudflare co-founder and CEO Matthew Prince wrote in an internal chat room yesterday, while he and others discussed whether Cloudflare was being hit by attacks from the prolific Aisuru botnet. But upon further investigation, Cloudflare...\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/ushopwell.com\/ublog\/massive-cloudflare-outage-was-triggered-by-file-that-suddenly-doubled-in-size\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"UshopWell.com\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2025-11-19T21:25:24+00:00\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"UShopWell\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"UShopWell\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"1 minute\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\\\/\\\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"Article\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/ushopwell.com\\\/ublog\\\/massive-cloudflare-outage-was-triggered-by-file-that-suddenly-doubled-in-size\\\/#article\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/ushopwell.com\\\/ublog\\\/massive-cloudflare-outage-was-triggered-by-file-that-suddenly-doubled-in-size\\\/\"},\"author\":{\"name\":\"UShopWell\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/ushopwell.com\\\/ublog\\\/#\\\/schema\\\/person\\\/6fd1f9e0ff932e534c86c70d5acff0fc\"},\"headline\":\"Massive Cloudflare outage was triggered by file that suddenly doubled in size\",\"datePublished\":\"2025-11-19T21:25:24+00:00\",\"mainEntityOfPage\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/ushopwell.com\\\/ublog\\\/massive-cloudflare-outage-was-triggered-by-file-that-suddenly-doubled-in-size\\\/\"},\"wordCount\":151,\"publisher\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/ushopwell.com\\\/ublog\\\/#organization\"},\"articleSection\":[\"Technology\"],\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\"},{\"@type\":\"WebPage\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/ushopwell.com\\\/ublog\\\/massive-cloudflare-outage-was-triggered-by-file-that-suddenly-doubled-in-size\\\/\",\"url\":\"https:\\\/\\\/ushopwell.com\\\/ublog\\\/massive-cloudflare-outage-was-triggered-by-file-that-suddenly-doubled-in-size\\\/\",\"name\":\"Massive Cloudflare outage was triggered by file that suddenly doubled in size - 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