Jake Williams
The Cloudflare outage was caused by a configuration file growing too large. Likely, they were blocking too many scrapers and caused out of memory exceptions parsing the file. Given this description, I'll be amazed if blocking AI scrapers isn't the outage catalyst.
https://www.theverge.com/news/822869/cloudflare-is-down-outage-x-twitter-downdetector
Nov 18 at 9:55pmWeb
Show threadBob RobertsNov 18
@malwarejake It’s a huge problem for them so they’re really active in the IETF group trying to set a standard to identify “legit” bot traffic.
BTW, the session went horribly wrong at the IETF meeting a few weeks ago when privacy groups pointed out huge flaws in the plan to register bots. https://youtu.be/yAwxJMxT9z4?si=XD_ijJPJD--eK24N
IETF 124: Web Bot Auth (WEBBOTAUTH) 2025-11-04 19:30

YouTube
Show threadkaramazov1879Nov 18
@malwarejake Oh good, it's only incompetence. Where the fuck are we in Russia?
Show threadSpaceLifeFormNov 19

@malwarejake

When you play whack-a-bot, sometimes the hammer bounches back and hits you in the head.

Even iptables has limitations.