CloudFlare said a permission error caused a major web outage

Internet service provider CloudFlare said a fault in its bot detection system triggered an outage that crashed around 20% of webpages, including some crypto platforms.

Cloudflare said In a post-mortem statement on Tuesday that a “feature file” used by the bot management system to fight cyberattacks grew beyond its normal limits, leading to a failure in the CloudFlare software.

“We apologize for the impact on our customers and the Internet in general. Given the importance of CloudFlare to the Internet ecosystem any disruption of any of our systems is unacceptable.”

The company was initially suspected the incident was caused by a hyper-scale distributed denial of service attack, but it was confirmed that there was no cyberattack or malicious activity.

CloudFlare handles nearly 20% of internet traffic and powers around one-third of the top 10,000 websites, apps and services.

Its outage took out websites for Coinbase, Blockchain.com, ledger, bitmex, Toncoin, Arbiscan, and Defillama, as well as X and Chatgpt, leading some crypto commentators to say the crypto industry’s reliance on centralized systems, some of which also went offline when Amazon’s web services suffered a Network Outage last month.

A spokesperson for EthStorage, which offers a product that allows Ethereum to be used as a web server, told Cointelegraph that the AWS and CloudFlare outages show “centralized infrastructure will always create single points of failure.”

“A complete decentralized web stack is needed more than ever,” the company said.

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