Today 20% of all websites around the world failed to load for 3 hours. That means that people couldn’t use ChatGPT, X, Uber, Canva, Dunkin, transit websites, and government websites for 3 hours.
I just think the Dunkin one is funny, because, America runs on Dunkin…
But even though some Americans actually had to drive to Dunkin in order to place their order, there’s a lot of America that relies on Cloudflare, whether they realize it or not. And I think things like this are going to happen a lot more.
Why?
Because we are automating more of our world and letting those automations make decisions with sweeping effects. The crash today was caused by a configuration file that is automatically generated to manage threat traffic. The file grew beyond the expected size of entries and this triggered a crash of their systems.