Topic starter
25/06/2026 12:06 am
TL;DR: Cloudflare’s outage was triggered by a permissions change that expanded an internal feature file until it broke production systems, showing how standing privileges can create operational blast radius even without an attacker, according to Apono. The incident reinforces that access scope and permanence are reliability controls as much as security controls.
Editorial analysis by NHI Mgmt Group, based on content published by Apono: “When the Internet Blinks: What Cloudflare’s Outage Teaches Us About Standing Privileges”.
Key questions
Q: What breaks when standing privileges are left in place for cloud infrastructure changes?
A: Standing privileges increase the chance that a routine change can affect shared systems far beyond the intended task.
Q: Why do standing privileges increase outage risk even without an attacker?
A: Because the same always-on rights that make administration convenient also let a normal human or service account make changes that propagate into critical systems.
Q: How can teams tell whether privilege scope is too broad for operational safety?
A: Look for identities that can modify shared inputs, production configuration, or automation outputs without a narrow task window or explicit containment.
Practitioner guidance
- Map high-impact change paths Identify internal workflows where a permissions change can alter shared runtime artefacts, feature files, or production configuration and classify them as high blast-radius paths.
- Replace always-on admin rights Move human admins and service accounts that touch sensitive production systems to just-in-time access so elevated rights exist only for the task window.
- Tighten non-human identity scope Review service accounts, automation pipelines, and API keys that can modify production inputs and remove any rights that exceed the smallest necessary change scope.
Bottom line: Standing privileges can turn an ordinary permissions change into a system-wide outage when access reaches shared production pathways.
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25/06/2026 8:56 am
Standing privileges are a resilience problem, not only a security problem. Cloudflare’s outage shows that persistent access can turn an ordinary administrative change into a broad production failure. When the same identity can keep modifying sensitive infrastructure without task-scoped boundaries, the blast radius extends from authorization into availability. Practitioners should treat privilege permanence as part of reliability engineering.
A few things that frame the scale:
- 91% of organisations say at least half of their privileged access is always-on, and only 1% have fully implemented just-in-time privileged access, according to a CyberArk study.
A question worth separating out:
Q: Should IAM teams prioritise just-in-time access for reliability or for security?
A: For both. Just-in-time access reduces the time a privileged identity can affect sensitive systems, which lowers the chance of misuse and the chance of accidental propagation. In environments where access can influence production state, JIT is a resilience control as much as an attack-control mechanism.
👉 Read our full editorial: Cloudflare outage exposes the operational risk of standing privileges