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Cloudflare Incident

From Our World of Text Wiki

On January 21st, 2025, Cloudflare placed a phishing warning on Our World of Text after an unknown party hit the site with false reports. Six days later, that same party had also reported OWOT's sister website Your World of Text.

Phishing message

Due to Cloudflare's poor customer support system, both communities had difficulty removing the warning from their sites. But OWOT developer FP and YWOT creator Andrew Badr were able to file disputes with Cloudflare, leading their warnings to be removed on March 11th and April 9th respectively.

In the intervening time, the two World of Text communities took part in countless jokes at the expense of Cloudflare's unreasonable policies.

Cloudflare

Cloudflare Policies

Cloudflare has a tendency of flagging websites without fact checking their reports. And once a website is cleared, there's nothing stopping it from being flagged right again.

Glitches

Sometimes, clicking "Ignore and Proceed" on the warning page will result in a 403 error, forcing users to restart the page and click it again.

This glitch is guaranteed to happen if the "Ignore and Proceed" button is located right beneath the "Learn More" button on the warning page.

Sometimes, clicking "Ignore and Proceed" will do nothing at all, forcing users to click it multiple times to access their websites.

Timeline

  •  
    Public shaming attempt(January 26th, 2025)
    January 21st, 2025: OWOT is flagged for phishing
  • January 26th, 2025: FP sends a public tweet towards @Cloudflare requesting attention towards the fact that the report hasn't been handled for the past five days.
  • January 27th, 2025: OWOT is cleared for the first time
  • January 27th, 2025: YWOT is flagged for phishing
  • January 29th, 2025: OWOT hit with a second phishing warning
  • March 11th, 2025: OWOT cleared a second time  
  • March 29th, 2025: FP begins working on removing YWOT's warning
  • April 9th, 2025: YWOT cleared

Community Sentiment

OWOT

 

YWOT

Potential Perpetrators

Gallery

 
 

YWOT