Cloudflare CTO says ‘we failed our customers’ after huge outage hits major apps

Cloudflare has officially reacted to the major outage which took down many popular platforms like Canva, Claude, ChatGPT, X and Perplexity. Cloudflare's Chief Technology Officer (CTO) Dane Knecht, while reacting to the outage, accepted that the company failed its customers while explaining the problem that led to the disruption.

Knecht said that a problem in the Cloudflare network impacted a large number of websites which rely on it. While the techie says that Cloudflare plans to share a breakdown of what happened in a few hours, he did give a short explanation of how things unfolded.

“I won’t mince words. Earlier today we failed our customers and the broader Internet when a problem in the Cloudflare network impacted large amounts of traffic that rely on us. The sites, businesses, and organizations that rely on Cloudflare depend on us being available and I apologise for the impact that we caused,” Knecht wrote in his post.

Cloudflare says the outage was triggered by a hidden software bug inside one of its core systems that handles bot related checks. Knecht also clarified that the outage was not linked to an attack.

“Transparency about what happened matters, and we plan to share a breakdown with more details in a few hours. In short, a latent bug in a service underpinning our bot mitigation capability started to crash after a routine configuration change we made. That cascaded into a broad degradation to our network and other services. This was not an attack,” he added.

Knecht went on to say that the scale of the impact and how long it took to fix it were both unacceptable. Cloudflare, he says, is already working on changes to ensure an issue like this cannot happen again.

“That issue, the impact it caused, and the time to resolution are unacceptable. Work is already underway to make sure it does not happen again, but I know it caused real pain today. The trust our customers place in us is what we value the most and we are going to do what it takes to earn that back,” he further noted.