At a Glance
Cloudflare’s November 2025 outage, triggered by a database permissions error, highlights the growing fragility of public cloud infrastructure.
Repeated outages and limited DDoS protection expose businesses to major risks. To protect your systems, choose BlackBox Hosting private cloud, offering isolated networks, multi-layer DDoS defence, stronger resilience and guaranteed uptime.
The Recent Cloudflare Service Outage
On 18th November 2025, Cloudflare experienced a major outage that took down a significant amount of the internet, including ChatGPT, Canva, X and, ironically, Downdetector.
Cloudflare’s service outage follows just a few weeks after failures at AWS DynamoDB and Azure cloud services, causing widespread disruptions, unprecedented downtime and lost revenue. But what caused the Cloudflare outage?
Cloudflare reported that a routine change in its database permissions led the system to generate duplicate entries in the file used by its tool to detect and block malicious automated traffic.
The duplicated data in the file swelled, impacting the proxy service and resulting in failures across its wide network. This incident is not the first, as it follows the 2019 debacle in a string of incidents marking Cloudflare’s outage history.
But why are such public cloud outages becoming so frequent? How does “one of the world’s largest networks” that invisibly powers the internet crumble due to a change in database permissions that closely resembles a malicious attack?
BlackBox Hosting explores why these incidents expose broader infrastructure risks, especially against malicious DDoS attacks and why your business must look beyond public clouds and related services for better security and resilience.
A Closer Look into Recent Cloudflare Service Outage and Its Outage History
Cloudflare is a web infrastructure provider working in the background to allow websites to serve pages to their users. Its cybersecurity technology sits between businesses and the wider internet to block cyber threats. Its service reach expands to one in five global websites.
In the recent incident, what was initially thought to be the result of a hyper-scale DDoS attack was reportedly due to mistakes in the query which Cloudflare’s system used to retrieve data, returning information that doubled the size of the feature file.
This started to generate bad feature files, affecting Cloudflare’s systems and its customers’ websites.
Looking closely at Cloudflare’s outage history, you’ll notice it has experienced multiple high-impact incidents, ranging from WAF malfunction events and API failures to configuration file crashes and edge network propagation errors.
It’s often during such public cloud outages, when one vendor goes down, that everything behind it goes down in an instant.
Which raises the question: Are you risking your business depending solely on one shared public vendor’s configuration profile?
The Limitations of Public Cloud DDoS Protection
Popular public clouds market their DDoS protection and monitoring services in a way that appears promising for emerging businesses, but the reality can be quite different.
Public cloud infrastructure is usually shared, reactive, restricted to specific services and with limited capability to absorb high volumetric attacks. Their DDoS protection can be limited against targeted, multi-vector and multi-terabit attacks that can overwhelm the most sophisticated networks.
If your business is with a public cloud, you may find it difficult to:
- Deploy dedicated hardware to filter and block DDoS traffic before it reaches your servers
- Control upstream filtering by working with your provider
- Add inline network devices that inspect malicious content, like floods or malformed packets
- Gain a fine-grained control over your traffic bandwidth
- Manage BGP (Border Gateway Protocol) responses
DDoS protection goes beyond a Web Application Firewall (WAF). While WAFs are great for blocking bad HTTP requests, adding logging and visibility and reducing application layer attacks, they can’t stop SYN floods, volumetric network floods, link exhaustion, bandwidth overconsumption and packet rate saturation.
If you’re looking to build real resilience from DDoS attacks and keep your business online, you need to see beyond public clouds and shared global edge providers. Consider the dedicated, isolated networks and secure infrastructure of on-premises or private clouds.
Watch the video below and find out more about the stringent cybersecurity measures we enforce at BlackBox Hosting.
BlackBox’s Private Cloud with DDoS Protection
If your business values exceptional uptime and unmatched security from malicious attacks like DDoS, you need an infrastructure that’s built for it.
BlackBox Hosting’s UK-based sovereign private cloud offers dedicated and controlled DDoS protection that not only protects your business but supports business continuity, the kind that public clouds struggle to match.
When you partner with us, you gain a private cloud with dedicated and managed options, secured with:
- Fully managed multi-layer in-built DDoS defence (at no extra cost), bespoke to your industry and business risk
- Globally applied Fortinet firewall DoS policies
- Proactive alerting and migration to not only detect threats, but also to act instantly
- Manual edge and Cogent upstream blocking
- Intelligent traffic management and protection with Voxility’s in-line DDoS filter
- A powerful 1Tbps+ DDoS shield to withstand the most potent attacks
- Private, isolated network that doesn’t share resources
- SLAs with 99.999% uptime guarantees
- Round-the-clock support from UK-based engineers
This is why high-security industries, including financial services, enterprise IT, and SaaS platforms, choose us and our private cloud services to keep them online when it matters the most.
Make your business unshakeable and secure; invest in BlackBox Hosting’s private cloud. Contact us today.
