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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. liampu+qb[view] [source] 2025-12-05 16:17:59
>>flamin+q3
Rollback is a reliable strategy when the rollback process is well understood. If a rollback process is not well known and well experienced, then it is a risk in itself.

I'm not sure of the nature of the rollback process in this case, but leaning on ill-founded assumptions is a bad practice. I do agree that a global rollout is a problem.

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3. newsof+gy[view] [source] 2025-12-05 17:56:40
>>liampu+qb
Rollback carries with it the contextual understanding of complete atomicity; otherwise it's slightly better than a yeet. It's similar to backups that are untested.
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