Cloudflare CEO Apologises After Major Outage; Says It Wasn’t a Cyberattack

On 18 November 2025 at 11:20 UTC, Cloudflare’s global network began experiencing serious failures, preventing core traffic from being delivered. Many Internet users trying to reach Cloudflare-powered sites, including ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Canva, and many others, encountered error pages that indicated the problem within Cloudflare’s own infrastructure.

Cloudflare has now confirmed that the outage was not caused by a cyberattack or malicious activity, but by an internal systems error. According to a blog post from Matthew Prince, co-founder and CEO of Cloudflare, the outage was triggered by a change in database permissions. This change caused the database to write multiple redundant entries into a “feature file” used by Cloudflare’s Bot Management system, effectively doubling its size.

The enlarged feature file was then propagated across Cloudflare’s network. However, the traffic-routing software on their machines was not designed to handle a file of that size, as it had a lower size limit. Well, when the file became large in sizs, the system broke. The failure led to widespread routing problems.

In his apology, Prince acknowledged the severity of the failure. He added:

Given Cloudflare’s importance in the Internet ecosystem, any outage of any of our systems is unacceptable … There was a period of time where our network was not able to route traffic … We know we let you down.

Initially, Cloudflare suspected the issue might be a massive DDoS attack. But after investigation, the team identified the real root cause, halted propagation, and restored a previous, smaller version of the feature file.

By 14:30 UTC, core traffic was mostly back to normal. From that point until 17:06 UTC, the team focused on handling the surge in network load as traffic returned, and by then, all systems were fully operational again.