Around the same time, Cloudflare’s chief technology officer Dane Knecht explained that a latent bug was responsible in an apologetic X post.

“In short, a latent bug in a service underpinning our bot mitigation capability started to crash after a routine configuration change we made. That cascaded into a broad degradation to our network and other services. This was not an attack,” Knecht wrote, referring to a bug that went undetected in testing and has not caused a failure.