Cloudflare: Large-scale outage caused by configuration error triggered by non-network attack

According to an analysis report published by Cloudflare's official blog, the large-scale outage on November 18 was not caused by an external network attack, but rather by an erroneous configuration file generated after a database permission adjustment, which led to anomalies in the core proxy system. This triggered interruptions in multiple products, including CDN, security services, Workers KV, Turnstile, and Access, marking the most severe incident since 2019.

The report noted that in the early stages of the incident, the team mistakenly assessed it as a DDoS attack, and ultimately completed the fix by rolling back to an old configuration file. The related services were fully restored at 01:06 AM Beijing time on November 19. Cloudflare described this outage as "unacceptable" and will accelerate the improvement of system resilience.