Details of the Cloudflare outage on July 2, 2019 (via) Best retrospective I’ve read in a long time. The outage was caused by a backtracking regex rule that was added to the Web Application Firewall project, which rolls out globally and skips most of Cloudflare’s regular graduar rollout process (delightfully animal themed, named DOG for the dogfooding PoP that their employees use, PIG for the Guinea Pig PoPs reserved for free customers, then Canary for the final step) so that they can deploy counter-measures to newly discovered vulnerabilities as quickly as possible—but the real value in the retro is that it provides an extremely deep insight into how Cloudflare organize, test and manage their changes. Really interesting stuff.
Recent articles
- Moltbook is the most interesting place on the internet right now - 30th January 2026
- Adding dynamic features to an aggressively cached website - 28th January 2026
- ChatGPT Containers can now run bash, pip/npm install packages, and download files - 26th January 2026