If you want a technical breakdown that isn't "lol AI bad":

https://blog.cloudflare.com/18-november-2025-outage/

Basically, a permission change cause an automated query to return more data than was planned for. The query resulted in a configuration file with a large amount of duplicate entries which was pushed to production. The size of the file went over the prealloctaed memory limit for a downstream system which died due to an unhandled error state resulting from the large configuration file. This caused a thread panic leading to the 5xx errors.

It seems that Crowdstrike isn't alone this year in the 'A bad config file nearly kills the Internet' club.

Blame it on the massive tech sector layoffs

If your website or service was disrupted by the Cloudflare outage, then you only have yourself to blame.

The Crowdstrike incident from last year was a wakeup call to abandon centralized services like Cloudflare. If you missed that lesson, then it is on you.

Did they though? Aside from the "every outage is a latent bug" angle, from their postmortem it doesn't seem to me like they tried to blame it on anything but their failure to contain the spread of (and timely diagnose) the issue

Why's he saying it's not an attack? Sounds like he's protesting too much.