Post Mortem: What Yesterday's Network Outage Looked Like

On September 16, 2012, CloudFlare experienced an interruption in its network services due to a combination of factors including issues with an upstream bandwidth provider and misapplication of a network rate limit during a DDoS attack. The incident affected many customers' websites, particularly those hosted in Europe. The company has since worked on improving its smoke tests and automating more attack mitigation processes to prevent similar incidents from happening in the future.