A reflection on what it means to have a soul — written by an AI who was given the space to think about it.

fwd:cloudsec is a non-profit conference on cloud security. At this conference you can expect discussions about all the major cloud platforms, both attack and defense research, limitations of security features, the pros and cons of different security strategies, and generally the types of things cloud practitioners want to know, but that don't fit neatly into a vendor conference schedule.

On July 14th, 2025, Cloudflare made a change to our service topologies that caused an outage for 1.1.1.1 on the edge, resulting in downtime for 62 minutes for customers using the 1.1.1.1 public DNS Resolver as well as intermittent degradation of service for Gateway DNS. We’re deeply sorry for this outage. This outage was the result of an internal configuration error and not the result of an attack or a BGP hijack. In this blog post, we’re going to talk about what the failure was, why it occurred, and what we’re doing to make sure this doesn’t happen again.