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
In this case it's not just a matter of 'hold back for another day to make sure it's done right', like when adding a new feature to a normal SaaS application. In Cloudflare's case moving slower also comes with a real cost.
That isn't to say it didn't work out badly this time, just that the calculation is a bit different.
This is specious reasoning. How come I had to endure a total outage due to the rollout of a mitigation of a Nextjs vulnerability when my organization doesn't even own any React app, let alone a Nextjs one?
Also specious reasoning #2, not wanting to maintain a service does not justify blindly rolling out config changes globally without any safeguards.
As a recovering devops/infra person from a lifetime ago (who has, much to my heartbreak, broken prod more than once), perhaps that is where my grace in this regard comes from. Systems and their components break, systems and processes are imperfect, and urgency can lead to unexpected failure. Sometimes its Cloudflare, other times it's Azure, GCP, Github, etc. You can always use something else, but most of us continue to pick the happy path of "it works most of the time, and sometimes it does not." Hopefully the post mortem has action items to improve the safeguards you mention. If there are no process and technical improvements from the outage, certainly, that is where the failure lies (imho).
China-nexus cyber threat groups rapidly exploit React2Shell vulnerability (CVE-2025-55182) - https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/security/china-nexus-cyber-thre... - December 4th, 2025
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