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[return to "Cloudflare outage on December 5, 2025"]
1. flamin+q3[view] [source] 2025-12-05 15:49:27
>>meetpa+(OP)
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

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2. this_u+I7[view] [source] 2025-12-05 16:04:49
>>flamin+q3
The question is perhaps what the shape and status of their tech stack is. Obviously, they are running at massive scale, and they have grown extremely aggressively over the years. What's more, especially over the last few years, they have been adding new product after new product. How much tech debt have they accumulated with that "move fast" approach that is now starting to rear its head?
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3. sandee+1q[view] [source] 2025-12-05 17:19:18
>>this_u+I7
I think this is probably a bigger root cause and is going to show up in different ways in future. The mere act of adding new products to an existing architecture/system is bound to create knowledge silos around operations and tech debt. There is a good reason why big companies keep smart people on their payroll to just change couple of lines after a week of debate.
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