Cloudflare outage caused by botched blocking of phishing URL www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/secu…

An attempt to block a phishing URL in Cloudflare’s R2 object storage platform backfired yesterday, triggering a widespread outage that brought down multiple services for nearly an hour.

Cloudflare R2 is an object storage service similar to Amazon S3, designed for scalable, durable, and low-cost data storage. It offers cost-free data retrievals, S3 compatibility, data replication across multiple locations, and Cloudflare service integration.

The outage occurred yesterday when an employee responded to an abuse report about a phishing URL in Cloudflare’s R2 platform. However, instead of blocking the specific endpoint, the employee mistakenly turned off the entire R2 Gateway service.

Cloudflare notes that both human error and the absence of safeguards such as validation checks for high-impact actions were key to this incident.