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.
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, hence the latent part.
Yeah, I just read the postmortem. My response was more about the confusion that any configuration change is inherently non-routine.