Cloudflare has explained the real reason behind its crash on November 18 which affected its Global network and caused major sites such as ChatGPT, Spotify, and X to go down.Its CTO Dane Knecht clarified that it was not an attack, but a latent bug in its bot mitigation service was triggered by a routine configuration change. This caused the service to crash, which initiated a chain reaction resulting in the disruption of the company’s software systems.The company’s CEO Matthew Prince, has confirmed that the crash was caused by a “bad configuration file” in their Bot Management system. As a result, they halted the automatic deployment of new Bot Management configuration files to prevent further propagation of faulty configurations.Continue to read for more details.Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince apologizes for the internet outage Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince stated in a detailed blog post that the Cloudflare network witnessed significant failures. He took to X (formerly Twitter) reflecting on the issue, and apologized for the mishap. He wrote:“We let the Internet down today. Here’s our technical post-mortem on what happened. On behalf of the entire @Cloudflare team, I’m sorry.”Users reported encountering delays or technical issues when trying to access services such as Grindr, Zoom, and Canva during the Cloudflare outage.In his blogpost message, he wrote:“The issue was not caused, directly or indirectly, by a cyber attack or malicious activity of any kind. Instead, it was triggered by a change to one of our database systems' permissions which caused the database to output multiple entries into a “feature file” used by our Bot Management system. That feature file, in turn, doubled in size. The larger-than-expected feature file was then propagated to all the machines that make up our network.”According to a report in Downdetector, sites including X and OpenAI suffered increased outages at the same time as the cybersecurity firm's problems. Shortly, the company released a message stating that a fix has been implemented. It further added that it is monitoring for errors to ensure that devices are back to normal.Cloudflare is a leading internet infrastructure company that provides various services aimed at improving the performance, security, and reliability of websites and online applications. “Today, businesses, non-profits, bloggers, and anyone with an Internet presence boast faster, more secure websites and apps thanks to Cloudflare,” its official website mentioned.The company describes itself as “one of the world’s largest networks.” It explained on its official website that it provides “security and performance for millions of Internet properties.”It has suffered several outages in the past, making the recent incident entirely unprecedented. For instance – in June 2019, a faulty Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) routing leak, which is responsible for directing internet traffic resulted in outages impacting services like Amazon, Google, Facebook, and others.The issue stemmed from DQE Communications, a small transit provider that wasn’t equipped to handle the routing load.In August 2020, an outage caused by an IP fault from internet service provider CenturyLink, affected many internet services. The outage reportedly took down services in US and parts of Europe.