Around the same time, Cloudflare’s chief technology officer Dane Knecht explained that a latent bug was responsible in an apologetic X post.
“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,” Knecht wrote, referring to a bug that went undetected in testing and has not caused a failure.
Honest question (I don’t work in IT): this sounds like a contradiction or at the very least deliberately placating choice of words. Isn’t a config change the opposite of routine?
Not really. Sometimes there are processes designed where engineers will make a change as a reaction or in preparation for something. They could have easily made a mistake when making a change like that.
E.g.: companies that advertise on a large sporting event might preemptively scale up (maybe warm up depending on language) their servers in preparation for a large load increase following some ad or mention of a coupon or promo code. Failure to capture the market it could generate would be seen as wasted $$$
Edit: auto-scale does not count on non essential products, people would not come back if the website failed to load on the first attempt.