Articles
Cloudflare outage on November 18, 2025
Matthew Prince's own postmortem of the outage that took down a meaningful chunk of the internet for several hours, X, ChatGPT, and Cloudflare's own status page among the casualties, and the root cause is almost mundane: a database permissions change caused a bot-management "feature file" to double in size and blow past a hardcoded limit. It's a good reminder that the scariest outages rarely come from novel attacks; they come from ordinary config changes interacting badly with an assumption nobody revisited. Prince's willingness to publish the gory detail, including where their own tooling made diagnosis slower, is what makes this worth reading over a sanitized summary.