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
- Reverse engineering some updates to Claude - 31st July 2025
- Trying out Qwen3 Coder Flash using LM Studio and Open WebUI and LLM - 31st July 2025
- My 2.5 year old laptop can write Space Invaders in JavaScript now, using GLM-4.5 Air and MLX - 29th July 2025