Cloudflare blames bad software deployment for website outage

A Cloudflare outage took down several sites and services. Among those affected were Feedly, CoinDesk, OKCupid, and Peloton. A number of websites showed a “502 Gateway Error” and were having trouble loading properly owing to this issue.

Initially thought to be a DDoS attack, the problem was said to be due to bad software deploy. John Graham- Cumming, Cloudflare CTO, wrote on the company blog wrote: “This was not an attack (as some have speculated) and we are incredibly sorry that this incident occurred. Internal teams are meeting as I write performing a full post-mortem to understand how this occurred and how we prevent this from ever occurring again.”

According to the CTO, the visitors to the Cloudflare sites received the 502 errors owing to a massive spike in CPU utilization on the network. The CPU spike was reportedly caused due to a bad software deploy. Once the company identified the problem, they rolled back the deploy and services returned to normal operations.

Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince took to twitter to further clarify the reason behind the outage by tweeting: “Massive spike in CPU usage caused primary and backup systems to fall over. Impacted all services. No evidence yet attack related. Shut down service responsible for CPU spike and traffic back to normal levels. Digging in to root cause.”