Technology

76918 readers

3409 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.

Our Rules

Follow the lemmy.world rules.
Only tech related news or articles.
Be excellent to each other!
Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
Politics threads may be removed.
No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.

Approved Bots

founded 2 years ago

MODERATORS

L3s@lemmy.world

enu@lemmy.world

technopagan@lemmy.world

L4s@lemmy.world

L3s@hackingne.ws

L4s@hackingne.ws

358

Cloudfare outage post mortem (blog.cloudflare.com)

submitted 1 day ago by homura1650@lemmy.world to c/technology@lemmy.world

57 comments fedilink hide all child comments

The issue was not caused, directly or indirectly, by a cyber attack or malicious activity of any kind. Instead, it was triggered by a change to one of our database systems' permissions which caused the database to output multiple entries into a “feature file” used by our Bot Management system. That feature file, in turn, doubled in size. The larger-than-expected feature file was then propagated to all the machines that make up our network.

The software running on these machines to route traffic across our network reads this feature file to keep our Bot Management system up to date with ever changing threats. The software had a limit on the size of the feature file that was below its doubled size. That caused the software to fail.

(page 2) 8 comments

sorted by: hot top controversial new old

[–] Zwuzelmaus@feddit.org 1 points 1 day ago (1 children)

a “feature file” used by our Bot Management system. That feature file, in turn, doubled in size.

Isn't cloudflare also offering bot prevention as a service?

Imagine if the number of bots suddenly increases by 2...

And already they are on their knees?

Muuuhahahahaaa....

load more comments (1 replies)

[–] falseWhite@lemmy.world -4 points 1 day ago (1 children)

What are the chances they started using AI to automate some of this and that's the real reason. It sounds like no human was involved in breaking this.

load more comments (1 replies)

[+] panda_abyss@lemmy.ca -28 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (7 children)

Classic example of how dangerous rust is.

If they had just used Python and ran the whole thing in a try block with bare except this would have never been an issue.

Edit: this was a joke, and not well done. I thought the foolishness would come through.

[–] SinTan1729@programming.dev 4 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (3 children)

I hope you're joking. If anything, Rust makes error handling easier by returning them as values using the Result monad. As someone else pointed out, they literally used unwrap in their code, which basically means "panic if this ever returns error". You don't do this unless it's impossible to handle the error inside the program, or if panicking is the behavior you want due to e.g. security reasons.

Even as an absolute amateur, whenever I post any Rust to the public, the first thing I do is get rid of unwrap as much as possible, unless I intentionally want the application to crash. Even then, I use expect instead of unwrap to have some logging. This is definitely the work of some underpaid intern.

Also, Python is sloooowwww.

load more comments (3 replies)

load more comments (6 replies)

load more comments