Cloudflare CEO blames single engineer for internal server error that took down roughly half of the internet—the real cause runs deeper
19 novembre 2025 à 11:13
A blog post by Matthew Prince, Cloudflare's CEO, suggests that Cloudflare repeated CrowdStrike's mistake: updating the entire infrastructure without first testing on a small group of hosts. As a result, large portions of the internet, including 4sysops, were inaccessible for several hours. Apologies for the latter. While most news sites reported that 20% of internet traffic was affected, the actual impact was much higher because the outage disproportionately affected high-traffic, top-ranking websites like X, ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Spotify. While Cloudflare's CEO blames a manual database permissions change, the incident exposes a deeper design flaw: a single engineer can disrupt massive portions of global internet infrastructure. In contrast, blockchain networks like Ethereum demonstrate how truly decentralized systems can prevent such single points of failure.