this post was submitted on 18 Nov 2025

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557

Widespread Cloudflare outage blamed on mysterious traffic spike (arstechnica.com)

submitted 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) by tonytins@pawb.social to c/technology@lemmy.world

85 comments fedilink hide all child comments

A Cloudflare spokesperson told Ars that the cloud services provider saw “a spike in unusual traffic to one of Cloudflare’s services,” which “caused some traffic passing through Cloudflare’s network to experience errors.”

“We do not yet know the cause of the spike in unusual traffic,” the spokesperson said. “We are all hands on deck to make sure all traffic is served without errors. After that, we will turn our attention to investigating the cause of the unusual spike in traffic.”

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[–] mech@feddit.org 291 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) (4 children)

Aren't spikes in unusual traffic the exact thing Cloudflare is supposed to protect you from?

[–] brokenwing@discuss.tchncs.de 84 points 4 days ago (1 children)

Task failed successfully.

[–] BeatTakeshi@lemmy.world 16 points 4 days ago

Fission Mailed

[–] the_crotch@sh.itjust.works 44 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (2 children)

They protected the endpoints. They just weren't able to route traffic to them. Id bet it takes a MUCH larger ddos to bring cloudflare to its knees vs your average website.

[–] mech@feddit.org 34 points 4 days ago (2 children)

From a Cloudflare customer's point of view, I don't care if my site is down from a DDOS or a Cloudflare outage, but the latter seems to happen more often.

[–] the_crotch@sh.itjust.works 25 points 4 days ago

From another cloudflare customer, if our sites still work internally it's marginally better than them being broken both inside and outside the org as they would be if they were ddosed directly. I guess it depends on what kind of services you're running.

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[–] tdawg@lemmy.world 25 points 4 days ago

ostensibly sure. But it's like car insurance. People pay them no matter what so why bother doing what they promised?

[–] oppy1984 12 points 4 days ago

Traffic spikes, on the Internet? One in a million chance! Now tow cloudflare outside the environment and call it a day.

[–] gravitywell@sh.itjust.works 224 points 4 days ago (3 children)

[–] locahosr443@lemmy.world 9 points 4 days ago

Amazon is now saving Americans from the crippling debt most of them seem to get into to drive a shiny box.. I wasn't expecting that.

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[–] JohnnyCanuck@lemmy.ca 112 points 4 days ago (2 children)

My bad, I started downloading The Lord of the Rings movies - Extended Edition. Sorry!

[–] tonytins@pawb.social 81 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (4 children)

How many times have I told you not to download movies or games in the middle of the day? You'll tie up the phone lines.

[–] cyrano@piefed.social 76 points 4 days ago (2 children)

Ok mum I stopped torrenting. You can use the phone again.

[–] chronicledmonocle@lemmy.world 37 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (3 children)

You can tell we're all old as fuck Millennials, because nobody else would make this joke. Lol.

[–] k0e3@lemmy.ca 34 points 4 days ago (3 children)

I can't even explain dial up modems to my son because I'd have to start by explaining what phone lines are.

[–] chronicledmonocle@lemmy.world 16 points 4 days ago

I had a Gen Z person ask me how I got a "3D printer save button" when I had a floppy disk for some reason.

[–] ace_garp@lemmy.world 11 points 4 days ago

Indeed.

"...you must first invent the universe".

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[–] krooklochurm@lemmy.ca 13 points 4 days ago (1 children)

I think that's a big part of why I like lemmy.

There are plenty of tech-savvy critical thinkers in the younger generations, but the naïveté, tech illiteracy, and lack of critical thinking ability of the average internet commenter / poster is appalling.

I've seen it just get worse and worse.

The internalized self censorship, the laissez faire attitude towards digital privacy, just pure fucking idiocy.

Wake me up when September ends.

[–] PancakesCantKillMe@lemmy.world 11 points 4 days ago

Sorry friend, it is Eternal.

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[–] dharmacurious@slrpnk.net 16 points 4 days ago

I had fully forgotten the phrase "you'll tie up the phone line!" And I just had a nam style flashback of sneaking internet time during the day when my mom was at work, and praying that no one tried to call

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[–] Treczoks@lemmy.world 105 points 5 days ago (3 children)

Which AI scraper went rogue this time?

[–] VieuxQueb@lemmy.ca 20 points 4 days ago

Mabe the new bezos Prometheus?

[–] ggppjj@lemmy.world 16 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago)

Gemini 3 was released today 👀

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[–] melroy@kbin.melroy.org 82 points 5 days ago (3 children)

I hope more websites will move away from cloudflare. I could not access 90% of the web anymore. This is insane if just 1 company goes down, the whole internet is dead. The internet is broken!

[–] mybuttnolie@sopuli.xyz 57 points 5 days ago (5 children)

and it's fucking annoying to check the box to "prove you're a human" when trying to access almost any site. some days it will make me do it three times before letting me through

[–] melroy@kbin.melroy.org 21 points 4 days ago (3 children)

I understand the need for anti-bot or DDoS protection, but there are better and free options today. Like Anubis. So please, in the love of The Internet, move away from cloudflare. Ideally yesterday already.

Edit: or run your own decent firewall with geo blocks. FireHOL block lists. Intrusion detection.

Setting up fail2ban. . Etc. Etc.

[–] _cryptagion@anarchist.nexus 16 points 4 days ago (1 children)

Anubis is to protect against scraping from LLMs, it has nothing to do with DDoS protection. Not only that, but the Anubis Github repo recommends most people to use Cloudflare instead, since Anubis is the "nuclear" option.

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[–] Imgonnatrythis@sh.itjust.works 65 points 4 days ago

Did I miss something? Is everyone downloading the Epstein files today?

[–] SoftestSapphic@lemmy.world 15 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (1 children)

"You see, half the internet went down because people used our services a little too much."

Ok wtf???

How does cloudflare not have DOS detection?

[–] tonytins@pawb.social 15 points 3 days ago (2 children)

That was based on anecdotal evidence, at the time. The real cause was Cloudflare shooting themselves in foot again because of a bad config file.

[–] Kazumara@discuss.tchncs.de 7 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

The bad config file is somewhere in the middle of the chain of causality.

They changed database permissions, revealing a dormant bug in a database query, leading to config files being generated badly with duplicate lines, making them too large for intake by the bot detection service, which didn't have good input validation and made the process panic instead, ruining the service.

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[–] arsCynic@lemmy.ml 14 points 4 days ago (1 children)

Widespread Cloudflare outage blamed on mysterious traffic spike

Just like my 14-year-old self who "mysteriously" bricked his parents' PC by totally SFW Web usage.

[–] Strobelt@lemmy.world 7 points 4 days ago (2 children)

Double clicks h4rdc0r3p0rn.exe right from limewire

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[–] ellen.kimble@piefed.social 21 points 4 days ago (1 children)

Did someone google Google again?

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[–] themurphy@lemmy.ml 27 points 5 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (2 children)

EDIT: Cloudflare made a blog post explaining it as a malfunction.

My original post:

It's very normal for countries to DDOS each other to test their limits, and if it could be incorporated in an attack.

And yes, of course the US is also testing this against other nations.

It could also just be a malfunction or someone acting independently. Who knows.

[–] TomMasz@lemmy.world 14 points 4 days ago (3 children)

Every DDoS that hits Cloudflare is bigger than the previous one. There's bound to be one that they couldn't instantly mitigate.

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[–] turmoil@feddit.org 3 points 3 days ago (1 children)

This was a malfunction, not a DDoS attack. https://blog.cloudflare.com/18-november-2025-outage/

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[–] GreenKnight23@lemmy.world 5 points 3 days ago (1 children)

translation: we don't fucking know

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[–] HazardousBanjo@lemmy.world 4 points 3 days ago

When damn near every single essential service is built on the same infrastructure of tissue paper and chewed bubble gum, it shouldn't surprise everyone when it collapses all at once.

[–] SHBI7368@sh.itjust.works 4 points 3 days ago

It was google. Chatgpt and claudeai were down so i said oh hey let me try gemeni. What happened that day? By coincidence gemeni 3 came out

[–] devfuuu@lemmy.world 13 points 4 days ago

Capitalists: "All lines must go up!" ... (Traffic line goes up a little bit) Capitalists: "Not like that!"

[–] postmateDumbass@lemmy.world 5 points 4 days ago

All the people trying to cash out their Dr. Pepper points?

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