Cloudflare explains the outage that occurred on Tuesday that caused ChatGPT to temporarily shut down

Cloudflare’s bot controls should help deal with issues like crawlers collecting information to train generative AI. Also recently Announced a system that uses generative artificial intelligence To create “AI Maze,” a new mitigation approach that uses AI-generated content to slow, confuse, and waste the resources of AI crawlers and other bots that don’t respect “no crawl” directives.

However, it says the issues today were due to changes in the database’s permissions system, not the generative AI technology, not the DNS, and not what Cloudflare initially suspected, which was a cyberattack or malicious activity such as a “large-scale DDoS attack.”

According to Prince, a machine learning model is behind it Bot management that generates bot scores for requests traveling over its network has a frequently updated configuration file that helps identify bot requests; However, “a change in the behavior of our underlying ClickHouse query that generates this file caused it to contain a large number of duplicate ‘features’ rows.”

There are more details in the post about what happened next, but changing the query caused the ClickHouse database to create duplicate copies of the information. As the configuration file quickly grew beyond predefined memory limits, it disabled “the underlying proxy system that handles traffic processing for our customers, for any traffic that relies on the botnet module.”

As a result, companies that used Cloudflare’s rules to block certain bots returned false positives and cut off real traffic, while Cloudflare customers who did not use bot points created in their rules remained online.