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.”
Aren’t spikes in unusual traffic the exact thing Cloudflare is supposed to protect you from?
Task failed successfully.
Fission Mailed
ostensibly sure. But it’s like car insurance. People pay them no matter what so why bother doing what they promised?
Traffic spikes, on the Internet? One in a million chance! Now tow cloudflare outside the environment and call it a day.
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.
Buying a car is pretty capitalist.
I’m not envious and I like the thought of some places on the planet having it normal for one family to have few cars, but - in certain places where capitalism has already been disrupted a few times in history, like Moscow, Russia where I, eh, reside, am headquartered, dwell, roam, … - and those places are richer than much of the world, - people would think the guy from the screenshot doesn’t have many reasons to try disrupting it.
Which AI scraper went rogue this time?
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!
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
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.
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.
Well then we are all fked. I recommend then using a good internet connection to host your stuff behind it. I also recommend a good firewall.
A firewall that can block on geo location. Block on ASN level. And intrusion detection. And also use block lists like FireHOL level 1 to 4.
Of course configure fail2ban etc.
Again we really need to come up with alternatives now… I’m sick of how the current internet develops.
next time you’re at bat against one of these, you may try moving less diligently / efficiently to the checkbox. overall, a slowed and less exact approach. I’ve not tested this enough to REALLY say it makes a difference, but in cases where I continually fail, going slower does seem to be the time I finally get through.
I find the same for the picture puzzles where you select images that match or apply to the posted context or whatever else the mission may be.
It isn’t just annoying, it often breaks for people on less-popular browsers. Plus, it requires you to run Cloudflare’s Javascript. You think this outage was bad—what do you think would happen if someone slipped them a bit of malware?
He still doesn’t know, guys 😅
🤖
It’s almost like the internet is a public good that everyone should have access to
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.
Every DDoS that hits Cloudflare is bigger than the previous one. There’s bound to be one that they couldn’t instantly mitigate.
This was a malfunction, not a DDoS attack. https://blog.cloudflare.com/18-november-2025-outage/
Thanks mate, I edited my post for clarity.
“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?
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.
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.
Lmao
Capitalists: “All lines must go up!” … (Traffic line goes up a little bit) Capitalists: “Not like that!”
All the people trying to cash out their Dr. Pepper points?
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Was there a specific event that coincided with the blackout? I don’t know the details of current US events, just that they’re crazy and depressing.
Why DDoS Cloudflare when they could just pressure them directly like they did with BBC or Paramount? I know this administration isn’t exactly the brightest but that doesn’t seem like something they’d do.
why is it whenever I see you post, it’s something batshit crazy with a bunch of downvotes?
I’m assuming it’s because they’re batshit crazy
This is a much more positive view than mine, which is that AI corps are trying to make the rest of the internet less reliable to drive traffic to themselves but it failed/backfiredI’d only heard about X before reading the articlechatgpt and claude were both down
Local LLM was up the whole time.
Better privacy, better uptime.
not the point. the point was that “conspiracy of ai corporations to drive traffic to themselves” doesn’t make much sense.
