Cloudflare blames this week's massive outage on database issues

Cloudflare experienced its largest outage in six years when a routine database permissions update caused its Bot Management system to produce an oversized feature/configuration file (exceeding a 200-feature hard limit). The malformed file propagated across the global network, triggered a Rust runtime panic and 5xx errors that disrupted core CDN, security services, Workers KV, dashboard access, and authentication for several hours; Cloudflare engineers reverted the file and fully restored service later the same day. The company confirmed the outage was not due to malicious activity.