A blog post published Tuesday night by Cloudflare co-founder and CEO Matthew Prince has details on what caused its “worst outage since 2019,” pinning the issue to a problem in the Bot Management system that is supposed to control which automated crawlers are allowed to scan particular websites using its CDN.

Cloudflare said last year that about 20 percent of the web runs through its network, which is supposed to share the load to keep websites online in the face of traffic spikes and DDoS attacks. But today’s crash disconnected many of them, knocking out everything from X to ChatGPT to the well-known outage tracker Downdetector for several hours and resembling recent outages caused by problems with Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services.

Cloudflare’s bot controls are supposed to help de

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