Details of the Cloudflare outage on July 2, 2019

I used to be really into regex and I'm now rusty, but wouldn't the desired representation of .* .* =.* be something closer to [^=]\* [^=]\* =[^=]\* ?

I feel like it could be optimized further but this would be the first step, and wouldn't most experienced regex authors use that from the beginning, nipping the whole backtracking problem in the bud and making the regex much more performant?

The original one would match "==", your suggestion would not. To get a clean regex they should switch to

    .*=.*

I don't think they should spend any time contemplating whether a regex will backtrack, because it's hard. Instead they should (and are planning to) simply switch to a better regex library that never backtracks.