I Could Snap My Fingers And You’d All Cease To Exist.
Cloudflare config file
what?
So basically on 18th of November 2025 Cloudflare services got sleepy and decided to go down. Shutting off 20% of internet with its DNS/CDN/proxy modules becoming numb and throwing errors here and there.
Explain to me like I’m 5
Cloudflare is a major network services provider, allowing all size of websites and web applications to have better performance and better speed to update their websites. When Cloudflare got down, all the websites that had their key parts depending on some of Cloudflare services had to go down, since there was no response from it, and no response means – no work.
WHY?
From open sources we can read that a “bot-management configuration file” of Cloudflare grew too big for services that were using it (inability to store it in memory or too slow code performance might be the cause of failure).
How can Bot-mgmt file grow so fast?
Cloudflare is commenting it, saying that their internal ClickHouse database was misconfigured and led to this Bot-mgmt file have many-many duplicates, stating same thing many times. It was duplicating it up until the point when Cloudflare noticed something fishy in the worsen performance of the Bot-protection services, but unfortunately, as with 2 previous world wide network services providers, issue in such services spreads quickly and is pretty hard to rollback in a snap.
What’s that Bot-mgmt file anyway?
This file is Cloudflare feature of analyzing incoming traffic (any request) to your website and help you defend against web crawlers (tools that parse your website content for its own use funnily enough I do understand that all my blog posts are going to be parsed by dozens of chat bots that will reuse my texts ) and attackers.
LESSONS
This error was a human error and a failure to see any internal configuration bug on early stages. Together with observability, validation and rollbacks procedures failure… It can happen to anyone and to be fair was handled pretty professionally, and we can be sure they will put more stress on the above areas.
Usual web developer 
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