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Cloudflare outage on December 5, 2025

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251–260 of 601 posts

Re: Cloudflare outage on December 5, 2025

#251
post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Like the other poster said, roll back should be the right answer the vast majority of the time. But it's also important to recognize that roll forward should be a replacement for the deployment you decided not to roll back, not a parallel deployment through another system. I won't say never, but a situation where the right answer to avoid a rollback (that it sounds like was technically fine to do, just undesirable fr…

Is a roll back even possible at Cloudflare's size? With small deployments it usually isn't too difficult to re-deploy a previous commit. But once you get big enough you've got enough developers that half a dozen PRs will have been merged since the start of the incident and now. How viable is it to stop the world, undo everything, and start from scratch any time a deployment causes the tiniest issues? Realistically th…

That will depend on how you structure your deployments, on some large tech companies, while thousands of changes little are made every hour, and deployments are mande in n-day cycles. A cut-off point in time is made where the first 'green' commit after that is picked for the current deployment, and if that fails in an unexpected way you just deploy the last binary back, fix (and test) whatever broke and either try again or just abandon the release if the next cut is already close-by.

Re: Cloudflare outage on December 5, 2025

#252
post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

... until the extended-range version is ordered and no one remembers to fix the leak. :]

They will remember, because it'll have been measured and documented, rigorously.

I've found that the real trick with documentation isn't creation, it's discovery. I wonder how that information is easily found afterwards.

Re: Cloudflare outage on December 5, 2025

#253

What I'm missing here is a test environment. Gradual or not; why are they deploying straight to prod? At Cloudflare's scale, there should be a dedicated room in Cloudflare HQ with a full isolated model-scale deployment of their entire system. All changes should go there first, with tests run for every possible scenario. Only after that do you use gradual deployment, with a big red oopsie button which immediately roll…

> Languages with strong type systems won't save you

Neither will seatbelts if you drive into the ocean, or helmets if you drink poison. I'm not sure what your point is.

Re: Cloudflare outage on December 5, 2025

#254

Cloudflare is now below 99.9% uptime, for anyone keeping track. I reckon my home PC is at least 99.9%.

Indeed. AWS too. I feel like the cloud hosting companies have lost the plot. "They can provide better uptime than us" is the entire rationale that a lot of small companies have when choosing to run everything in the cloud. If they cost more AND they're less reliable, what exactly is the reason to not self host?

Plus, when you self-host, you can likely fix the issue yourself in a couple of hours max, instead of waiting indefinitely for a fix or support that might never come.

Re: Cloudflare outage on December 5, 2025

#255
post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Kudos"? This is like the South Park episode in which the oil company guy just excuses himself while the company just continues to fuck up over and over again. There's nothing to praise, this shouldn't happen twice in a month. Its inexcusable.

twice in a month _so far_

Those AI agents are coding fast, or am I missing some obvious concept here?

Re: Cloudflare outage on December 5, 2025

#256
post #169
post #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.

My guess? Code written by AI

TBF they are still hiring a lot of eng people from US/UK/EU:

https://www.cloudflare.com/careers/jobs/?department=Engineer...

Re: Cloudflare outage on December 5, 2025

#257
post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Like the other poster said, roll back should be the right answer the vast majority of the time. But it's also important to recognize that roll forward should be a replacement for the deployment you decided not to roll back, not a parallel deployment through another system. I won't say never, but a situation where the right answer to avoid a rollback (that it sounds like was technically fine to do, just undesirable fr…

Is a roll back even possible at Cloudflare's size? With small deployments it usually isn't too difficult to re-deploy a previous commit. But once you get big enough you've got enough developers that half a dozen PRs will have been merged since the start of the incident and now. How viable is it to stop the world, undo everything, and start from scratch any time a deployment causes the tiniest issues? Realistically th…

Disclosure: Former Cloudflare SRE.

The short answer is "yes" due to the way the configuration management works. Other infrastructure changes or service upgrades might get undone, but it's possible. Or otherwise revert the commit that introduced the package bump with the new code and force that to rollout everywhere rather than waiting for progressive rollout.

There shouldn't be much chance of bringing the system to a novel state because configuration management will largely put things into the correct state. (Where that doesn't work is if CM previously created files, it won't delete them unless explicitly told to do so.)

Re: Cloudflare outage on December 5, 2025

#260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They will remember, because it'll have been measured and documented, rigorously.

I've found that the real trick with documentation isn't creation, it's discovery. I wonder how that information is easily found afterwards.

By reading the documentation thoroughly as a compulsory first step to designing the next system that depends on it.

I realise this may probably boggle the mind of the modern software developer.

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