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.
a routine configuration change
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.
I don’t think it was a bug making the configuration change, I think there was a bug as a result of that change.
That specific combination of changes may not have been tested, or applied in production for months, and it just happened to happen today when they were needed for the first time since an update some time ago, hence the latent part.
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.
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lotta bugs in corpo soft lately
thanks for illustrating the corpo speak
I hope the bug is fine
Nobody ever asks if the bug is ok
Fun fact time:
That’s why they’re called computer bugs.
In 1947, the Harvard Mark II computer was malfunctioning. Engineers eventually found a dead moth wedged between two relay points, causing a short. Removing it fixed the problem. They saved the moth and it’s on display at a museum to this day.
The moth was not okay.
And to be fair, the word bug had been used to describe little problems and glitches before that incident, but this was the first case of a computer bug.
Poor guy :(
Blame it on the massive tech sector layoffs
Evidence or speculation?
Obviousness? If you mass layoff your tech staff, you take the risk of more technical failures.
A smaller staff cannot do the same work as a larger one, and I guarantee you they’re being asked to progress at the same speed. So, the tradeoff is on the quality of the product and the testing, not on the speed of development.
I wonder if all recent outages aren’t just crappy AI coding
Shitty code has been around far longer than AI. I should know, I wrote plenty of it.
Now… I don’t like to brag…
I too have looked at my earliest repos in dispair
It’s always depressing when you ask the AI to explain your code and then you get banned from OpenAI
They trained it on the work of people like you.
Shame on them. I mark my career by how long it takes me to regret the code I write. When I was a junior, it was often just a month or two. As I seasoned it became maybe as long as two years. Until finally i don’t regret my code, only the exigencies that prevented me from writing better.
The AI was the shitty code we wrote along the way
Humans are plenty capable of writing crappy code without needing to blame AI.
Absolutely, but it does feel like things have spiked a bit recently.
Train on shitty code, get shitty code. Garbage in. Garbage out.
AI coding, AI compiling, AI bug testing, AI users, etc.
Indirectly, this was. He said this was a bug in their recent tool that allows sites to block AI crawlers that caused the outages. It’s a relatively new tool released in the last few months, so it makes sense it might be buggy as the rush to stop the AI DoS attacks has been pertinent.
Why’s he saying it’s not an attack? Sounds like he’s protesting too much.
There’s nothing to be gained from Cloudflare lying about this. It honestly makes them look worse if the outage was caused internally vs if it had been due to an attack
It’s not the first time Cloudflare has shot themselves in the foot.
