The issue was not caused, directly or indirectly, by a cyber attack or malicious activity of any kind. Instead, it was triggered by a change to one of our database systems’ permissions which caused the database to output multiple entries into a “feature file” used by our Bot Management system. That feature file, in turn, doubled in size. The larger-than-expected feature file was then propagated to all the machines that make up our network.
The software running on these machines to route traffic across our network reads this feature file to keep our Bot Management system up to date with ever changing threats. The software had a limit on the size of the feature file that was below its doubled size. That caused the software to fail.
How come?
You can route traffic without Cloudflare.
You can use CDNs other than Cloudflare’s.
You can use tunneling from other providers.
There are providers of DDOS protection and CAPTCHA other than Cloudflare.
Sure, Cloudflare is probably closest to asingle, integrated solution for the full web delivery stack. It’s also not prohibitively expensive, depending on who needs what.
So the true explanation, as always, is lazyness.