Cloudflare Outage Caused By Single Oversized File - Mike Dobuski

Yesterday's Cloudfare outage was reportedly caused by a single oversized file. ABC News Tech Reporter Mike Dobuski joins us to break down what happened and why it's so concerning.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Let's go right back to the hotline and bring in
ABC News tech reporter Mike Debuski to talk about that
outage that impacted a lot of different websites and apps yesterday.
It had to do with a company called Cloudflare. So Mike,
first of all, what does cloud flair do.

Speaker 2 (00:14):
It's a good question. So Cloudflare, a good way to
think about them is like an Internet middleman. And when
you go to a web browser and you try to
visit a website, what you're actually doing is you're asking
your browser to make a request for a website which
exists somewhere out in cyberspace, but actually at a server
farm somewhere. So if I go to Google Chrome, for example,

(00:37):
and type in ABC news dot com, Google Chrome sends
a request out to the ABC news dot Com server,
which then honors that request. And what Cloudflare does is
they sit in the middle of that process. They're making
sure that the requests that are being made to the
server come from legitimate sources. They're not bots, they're not
malicious actors, for example, and they're making sure that the

(00:58):
websites themselves are going to screw up your computer. You're
going to a legitimate safe place on the Internet. So
that's kind of where cloud Flare exists. They are an
Internet infrastructure security company and yesterday morning they experienced a
major outage, knocking some pretty big companies offline, among them Spotify,
Chat ept X, the social network formerly known as Twitter.

(01:23):
Even the system that we used to track outages like
this Ryan, which is called down Detector, was itself down
for a little while because of this outage.

Speaker 1 (01:32):
And it's alarming, I think for a lot of people
when you have one entity like this that can have
an issue and cause all of these different problems and
correct me if I'm wrong. They're saying this outage was
caused by one single file.

Speaker 2 (01:51):
Yeah, a bug in the code. Effectively, it had to
do with a system they employ to guard against bot networks.
So again these sort of fakes that float around out
on the Internet. They say this was not a cyber
attack or a hack. Basically, they were doing something on
the back end and a screw turned loose, and that again,
Ryan really underscores, you know, the danger of putting so

(02:13):
much power into the hands of so few companies. Of course,
we think back to last month when the AWS or
Amazon Web Services outage happened really sparked this conversation about
how centralized the infrastructure of the Internet has become. Well,
it seems like there's endless websites out there, certainly, the
reality is that the vast majority of them rely on
just a handful of companies, Aws and cloud Flare among

(02:37):
them to operate, and that means that when a tiny
bug in the system crops up, it has some pretty
major ripple effects, as we saw yesterday.

Speaker 1 (02:44):
Is there a difference between AWS and cloud Flair and
what they both do.

Speaker 2 (02:51):
Yeah, So AWS is a cloud computing service. It's run
by Amazon, of course, and they're basically like the foundation
for a variety of different websites out there. Cloud Flare
is a little bit more like a security system or
you know, a security guard for instance. Of course, there's
some overlap there. Cloud Flair runs, you know, sort of

(03:11):
cloud computing business of its own. AWS has its own
security systems. These are basically the third parties out there
that operate in the event that you know, a business
doesn't want to spin up their own security services on
the Internet or host their own website. That cannot be
cost effective for them in many cases, and these are
pretty robust businesses, but as we said, they're also pretty centralized,

(03:33):
and that means again that you know, you can feel
some pretty big ripple effects when something goes wrong.

Speaker 1 (03:38):
So it's good news that it wasn't some kind of
cyber attack that knocked all of these different apps and
sites down, but it's also mad news that, you know,
one little thing like that can cause this kind of
online disruption.

Speaker 2 (03:50):
Yeah, and I think what you're going to see over
the next few days and weeks here, Ryan, especially in
light of the latest outage here, is, you know, security
officials at very companies and internet cybersecurity experts start to
talking about this idea of diversification. Right instead of putting
all your eggs into the cloud flare basket, you know,

(04:10):
running the risk that when something goes wrong, it can
you know, majorly disrupt your business, Maybe you should try
to diversify where you do your business online when it
comes to security. Maybe you put a few eggs into
the cloud flare basket, a few eggs into some other
basket that's out there. That's you know, an ongoing conversation.
We started talking about that in the wake of the

(04:31):
AWS outage. In fact, I was talking to a cybersecurity
professional professional on Tuesday who told me, it's like there's
a degree of this that's just unavoidable. Right, Our online
systems are really complex. Things are going to go wrong
from time to time. People are imperfect, so is the web.
And that means that really the only thing that businesses
can do to guard against this is to, you know,

(04:52):
start thinking about this idea of diversification.

Speaker 1 (04:55):
All right, ABC News tech reporter Mike Debuski with us
this morning. Mike, really appreciate it, Thanks so much, of course.

Speaker 2 (05:00):
Ryan tick here