The fix for CVE-2019-0199 was incomplete and did not address HTTP/2 connection window exhaustion on write in Apache Tomcat versions 9.0.0.M1 to 9.0.19 and 8.5.0 to 8.5.40 . By not sending WINDOW_UPDATE messages for the connection window (stream 0) clients were able to cause server-side threads to block eventually leading to thread exhaustion and a DoS.

The HTTP/2 implementation in Apache Tomcat 9.0.0.M1 to 9.0.14 and 8.5.0 to 8.5.37 accepted streams with excessive numbers of SETTINGS frames and also permitted clients to keep streams open without reading/writing request/response data. By keeping streams open for requests that utilised the Servlet API's blocking I/O, clients were able to cause server-side threads to block eventually leading to thread exhaustion and a DoS.