I Finally Decided to Write on Medium Again… Because the Internet Crashed
It has been a long time since I posted anything on Medium. I’ve been overthinking topics for weeks (I’ve even made a list now… coming soon), waiting for that perfect spark of inspiration.
Yesterday, I finally decided to stop procrastinating. I sat down, cracked my knuckles, and opened LeetCode. I was ready to tackle a “Medium” difficulty problem. I was in the zone. I was going to be productive.
And then the screen went blank.
A “502 Bad Gateway” error stared back at me.
I toggled my Wi-Fi. I yelled at my ISP.
Turns out, I wasn’t special — Cloudflare was down. And since that finally gave me something to write about, here’s a quick breakdown of why we all lost our connection yesterday.
The “Traffic Cop” took a nap
If you aren’t thaaaat technical (neither am I), think of Cloudflare as the traffic controller of the internet. It stands in front of millions of websites — including ChatGPT, Canva, and apparently LeetCode — shielding them from bad bots and making everything load faster.
Yesterday, around 11:20 UTC, that traffic controller tripped over its own shoelaces.
So, what actually happened?
It wasn’t a cyber-attack.
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It was a software update.
Cloudflare pushed a change to their configuration rules.
- The intention: improve bot detection.
- The reality: the update created a configuration file that was slightly too large for the system to handle.
Because computers are helpfully unhelpful, the system rebooted… and immediately tried to load the same heavy file again.
Cue: an infinite loop of crashing and restarting.
The fix
Eventually, engineers spotted the issue and rolled back the update — basically the global equivalent of pressing Ctrl + Z.
The takeaway
The internet runs on fiber optics, distributed systems, and sophisticated algorithms… yet it can still be knocked over by a configuration file that’s just a few kilobytes too chubby.
The good news: the internet is back.
The bad news: I am still not able to solve that leetcode problem.
At least it gave me a Medium post.
[A quick, spontaneous read. Thanks for sticking around. Will be back with a more informative one.]
