Yesterday's global internet outage caused by single file on Cloudflare servers — unexpected file size caused catastrophic error, knocking out several major websites

Cloudflare experienced a global internet outage due to a single file on its servers that unexpectedly grew in size, causing a catastrophic error. The outage impacted major websites like X, OpenAI, and some McDonald’s branches worldwide. The issue was not a cyber attack but a configuration error that led to the file size increase. Cloudflare's infrastructure was affected from 11:28 UTC, with services fully restored by 17:06 UTC. Despite alternatives, Cloudflare's significant market share means its outages can have widespread implications.