I don't feed cookies to my scraper, so it doesn't index the Investigations board. I use cookies for other tasks, but none of them were running so I can't tell if it would have worked.
Bpip fed cookies under Vod's code (it probably still does) to get user info so we probably already know the issue still persisted during that time.
I wonder if this was resolved by whitelisting everything or just the bots, we probably won't find out similarly to if this was something automated by CF, an accidental kill switch triggered or was implemented for a reason (all are quite likely).
Based on the up time of this forum, there has to be multiple people with access to all connection information (there's probably more that could do defensive operations too - such as a controlled rerouting or changing certain cloudlfare settings to improve performance or limit some more intense pingers).