Company
Date Published
Nov. 26, 2024
Author
Jamie Herre, Tom Walwyn, Christian Endres, Gabriele Viglianisi, Mik Kocikowski, Rian van der Merwe
Word count
1644
Language
English
Hacker News points
9

Summary

The Cloudflare Logs incident on November 14, 2024, resulted in a significant loss of customer event logs due to misconfiguration and cascading failures within the system architecture. The incident highlighted the importance of subsystems protecting themselves from failures in other parts of the larger system to prevent cascades. A bug in the configuration system led to an initial mistake, which triggered a second latent bug in Logfwdr itself, causing a massive spike in customer logs being sent by the service. The subsequent overload on Buftee, a buffer management system, resulted in it becoming unresponsive and unable to handle the increased workload. The incident serves as a reminder that failures within systems at scale are inevitable and require proactive measures to prevent recurrences, including regular testing and configuration of fail-safes and backup systems.