"Throwing us off and making us believe this might have been an attack was another apparent symptom we observed: Cloudflare’s status page went down. The status page is hosted completely off Cloudflare’s infrastructure with no dependencies on Cloudflare. While it turned out to be a coincidence, it led some of the team diagnosing the issue to believe that an attacker may be targeting both our systems as well as our status page."
Unfortunately they do not share, what caused the status page to went down as well. (Does this happen often? Otherwise a big coincidence it seems)
The status page is hosted on AWS Cloudfront, right? It sure looks like Cloudfront was overwhelmed by the traffic spike, which is a bit concerning. Hope we'll see a post from their side.
CloudFront has quotas[0] and they likely just hit those quota limits. To request higher quotas requires a service ticket. If they have access logs enabled in CloudFront they could see what the exact error was.
And since it seems this is hosted by Atlassian, this would be up to Atlassian.
It looks a lot like a CloudFront error we randomly saw today from one of our engineers in South America. I suspect there was a small outage in AWS but can't prove it.
Probably non zero number of companies use cloudfront and other cdns as fallback for cloudflare or running a blended cdn so not surprising to see other cdns hit with a thundering herd when cloudflare went down
This situation reminds me of risk assessment, where you sometimes assume two rare events are independent, but later learn they are actually highly correlated.
it seems like a good chance that despite thinking their status page was completely independent of cloudfront, enough of the internet is dependent on cloudfront now that they're simply wrong about the status page's independence.
Unfortunately they do not share, what caused the status page to went down as well. (Does this happen often? Otherwise a big coincidence it seems)