If your website was slow, throwing strange errors, or if you couldn’t get a single Captcha to work on Tuesday, November 18th, you are not alone. Large parts of the internet went down, not due to a cyberattack or server raid, but due to a subtle configuration mistake that rippled across the globe, affecting millions of users and major services like X (Twitter) and ChatGPT.
As your dedicated Quad City web design and hosting team, we always monitor these types of large-scale incidents. We want to assure our clients and partners that this was an industry-wide event caused by a major infrastructure provider, not an issue with your website’s code, theme, or hosting environment.
Here is a straightforward explanation of what happened, and why your critical website functions, like keeping the spam bots out, were failing.
1. What is Cloudflare, and Why Did It Affect My Website?
Cloudflare is a massive, behind-the-scenes internet company that acts as a shield, speed booster, and traffic cop for millions of websites, including many using WordPress. When the service goes down, it causes a chain reaction that results in the widespread errors you saw across the web.
They provide services like:
- Content Delivery Networks (CDN): Caching your site’s content closer to your users for faster loading.
- DDoS Protection: Guarding your site against massive traffic floods (cyberattacks).
- Security Services: Identifying and blocking malicious bots and spam.
If your website was slow or down, it means it relies on Cloudflare for one of these services. When the Cloudflare system fails, it’s like a traffic cop collapsing in the middle of a busy intersection, nothing gets through, and you see a 500 Internal Server Error instead of your beautifully designed page.
2. The Root Cause: A Latent Bug and a “Fat” File
The Cloudflare team has since issued a detailed post-mortem, and the cause was not malicious, but technical and accidental.
The short version: A critical configuration file that manages their security settings (specifically for their Bot Management service) suddenly became too large, exceeding its internal software limit.
The details, according to Cloudflare’s detailed post-mortem:
- Database Change: A routine change in database permissions caused a system to generate a configuration file with too many entries. This file grew beyond its expected size, well over its allowed limit.
- Software Crash: When Cloudflare’s core traffic-handling software attempted to load this oversized configuration file, the system failed and crashed.
- The Vicious Cycle: Because the core software crashed, your website requests couldn’t be processed. Making matters worse, the faulty file was regenerated and re-distributed every few minutes, causing the system to briefly recover only to crash again shortly after. This led to intermittent site access for roughly three hours, affecting a wide range of major internet services.
3. Why Was My Captcha/Login Not Working?
If you rely on Cloudflare’s anti-abuse services, such as their Turnstile product (often used in place of traditional Captchas), you likely saw this fail repeatedly.
Cloudflare’s Bot Management module, which handles these security checks, sits in the “critical path” for traffic flow. Because the bug originated within this system, it was one of the first things to fail.
When you tried to log in or submit a form, the request hit the crashed security service, and the security check simply failed to load reliably. This meant you were either blocked by an error message or stuck in an endless loop, wondering if you were, in fact, the bot.
4. What This Means for Your Business
While an outage of this magnitude is frustrating, it highlights a crucial reality of the modern internet: centralization is a risk. When major infrastructure providers like Cloudflare, AWS, or Google have problems, everyone feels it.
The good news is that the Cloudflare team identified the issue, rolled back the configuration change, and had core services mostly back online within a few hours.
At Quad City Web Design, we take the stability of your digital presence seriously. While no website can be immune to global internet infrastructure issues, we ensure that your hosting environment is robust, and we manage your website and SEO diligently so that when the net wobbles, you recover quickly.
If you have any questions about how this outage specifically impacted your business or want to discuss moving to one of our top-of-the-line hosting environments, reach out to your dedicated project manager today.
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