Cloudflare outage traced to one oversized file

• Cloudflare's services help customers track and manage their internet traffic.

What they're saying: Cloudflare spokesperson Jackie Dutton said the outage was caused by a "configuration file that is automatically generated to manage threat traffic."

• "The file grew beyond an expected size of entries and triggered a crash in the software system that handles traffic for a number of Cloudflare's services," Dutton said.
• Cloudflare is expected to share a more detailed explanation of the outage later. As of now, there is no evidence of a cyberattack.
• "We apologize to our customers and the Internet in general for letting you down today," Dutton said. "We will learn from today's incident and improve."

The big picture: This is just the latest major outage — following similar disruptions at Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure — in the past month.

• Most outages are caused by internal issues, such as a misconfiguration or a faulty software update.

Go deeper: AWS outage spotlights the global economy's fragile foundations