Cloudflare: Crashes That Shape Cybersecurity Strategy

Cloudflare’s recent outage on November 18, 2025 disrupted access to many top websites, exposing the risks of over-reliance on a single provider. While the company confirmed the issue was caused by a database permissions error—not a cyberattack—the incident served as a real-world stress test for organizations dependent on Cloudflare’s Web Application Firewall (WAF), bot management, and DNS services.

Key Highlights

The Outage Impact

• Cloudflare services degraded for several hours, leaving websites unreachable.
• Many organizations struggled to pivot away due to reliance on Cloudflare DNS.
• Some companies bypassed Cloudflare temporarily, exposing themselves to SQL injection, credential stuffing, and bot attacks.

Security Lessons Learned

• Aaron Turner (IANS Research): Warned that developers may have relied too heavily on Cloudflare to block OWASP Top Ten vulnerabilities.
• Nicole Scott (Replica Cyber): Called the outage a “free tabletop exercise,” urging organizations to review emergency DNS changes, shadow IT, and fallback plans.
• Logs during the outage revealed spikes in malicious traffic, forcing companies to distinguish between legitimate threats vs. noise.

Root Cause Analysis

• Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince explained the outage stemmed from a database permissions change that doubled the size of a bot management feature file, overwhelming the network.
• No evidence of cyberattack or malicious activity was found.

Strategic Recommendations

• Martin Greenfield (Quod Orbis): Advised splitting WAF and DDoS protection across multiple zones, using multi-vendor DNS, and segmenting applications to avoid cascading failures.
• Continuous monitoring and resilience planning are essential to reduce single-vendor dependency.

Why This Matters for Cybersecurity Strategy

Cloudflare powers nearly 20% of websites worldwide, making its stability critical for the modern web. Outages highlight the fragility of centralized cloud infrastructure and the need for:

• Resilient fallback plans
• Multi-cloud strategies
• Proactive monitoring of exposed infrastructure

Organizations should treat outages as cybersecurity drills, analyzing both external threats and internal behaviors during downtime.

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