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Cloudflare outage on December 5, 2025

blog.cloudflare.com

11–20 of 601 posts

Re: Cloudflare outage on December 5, 2025

#11
My understanding, paraphrased: "In order to gradually roll out one change, we had to globally push a different configuration change, which broke everything at once".

But a more important takeaway:

> This type of code error is prevented by languages with strong type systems

Re: Cloudflare outage on December 5, 2025

#13
What's the culture like at Cloudflare re: ops/deployment safety?

They saw errors related to a deployment, and because it was related to a security issue instead of rolling it back they decided to make another deployment with global blast radius instead?

Not only did they fail to apply the deployment safety 101 lesson of "when in doubt, roll back" but they also failed to assess the risk related to the same deployment system that caused their 11/18 outage.

Pure speculation, but to me that sounds like there's more to the story, this sounds like the sort of cowboy decision a team makes when they've either already broken all the rules or weren't following them in the first place

Re: Cloudflare outage on December 5, 2025

#14
post #2

Unwrap() strikes again

I guess you’re being facetious but for those who didn’t click through:

> This type of code error is prevented by languages with strong type systems. In our replacement for this code in our new FL2 proxy, which is written in Rust, the error did not occur.

Re: Cloudflare outage on December 5, 2025

#15
> This change was being rolled out using our gradual deployment system, and, as part of this rollout, we identified an increase in errors in one of our internal tools which we use to test and improve new WAF rules. As this was an internal tool, and the fix being rolled out was a security improvement, we decided to disable the tool for the time being as it was not required to serve or protect customer traffic.

Come on.

This PM raises more questions than it answers, such as why exactly China would have been immune.

Re: Cloudflare outage on December 5, 2025

#16
Whats going on with cloudflare's software team?

I have seen similar bugs in cloudflare API recently as well.

There is an endpoint for a feature that is available only to enterprise users, but the check for whether the user is on an enterprise plan is done at the last step.

Re: Cloudflare outage on December 5, 2025

#17

My understanding, paraphrased: "In order to gradually roll out one change, we had to globally push a different configuration change, which broke everything at once". But a more important takeaway: > This type of code error is prevented by languages with strong type systems

Prevented unless they assert the wrong invariant at runtime like they did last time.

Re: Cloudflare outage on December 5, 2025

#18

What's the culture like at Cloudflare re: ops/deployment safety? They saw errors related to a deployment, and because it was related to a security issue instead of rolling it back they decided to make another deployment with global blast radius instead? Not only did they fail to apply the deployment safety 101 lesson of "when in doubt, roll back" but they also failed to assess the risk related to the same deployment…

As usual, Cloudflare is the man in the arena.

Re: Cloudflare outage on December 5, 2025

#19
Make faster websites:

> we started rolling out an increase to our buffer size to 1MB, the default limit allowed by Next.js applications.

Why is the Next.js limit 1 MB? It's not enough for uploading user generated content (photographs, scanned invoices), but a 1 MB request body for even multiple JSON API calls is ridiculous. There frameworks need to at least provide some pushback to unoptimized development, even if it's just a lower default request body limit. Otherwise all web applications will become as slow as the MS office suite or reddit.

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