Cloudflare recently published a detailed resilience initiative called Code Orange: Fail Small, outlining a comprehensive plan to prevent large-scale service disruptions after two major network outages in the past six weeks. The plan prioritizes controlled rollouts, improved failure-mode handling, and streamlined emergency procedures to make the company’s global network more robust and less vulnerable to configuration errors.
Cloudflare’s network suffered significant outages on November 18 and December 5, 2025, with the first incident disrupting traffic delivery for about two hours and ten minutes and the second affecting roughly 28 percent of applications behind its network for about 25 minutes. These events followed near-instantaneous global configuration changes that, while intended to improve security or bot detection, propagated faulty settings rapidly across hundreds of data centers and triggered widespread service failures.
The Code Orange: Fail Small plan mandates that configuration changes be rolled out in a controlled, phased manner similar to Cloudflare’s existing Health Mediated Deployment (HMD) process for software releases, which includes staged validations and automatic rollback mechanisms. Historically, configuration updates, such as DNS records or security rules, were propagated globally within seconds via the internal Quicksilver system, which became a liability when incorrect changes spread too fast. Under the new policy, configuration updates will pass through monitoring gates and gradual deployments to detect issues early and mitigate impact before they affect broad swaths of infrastructure.
Cloudflare also plans to review and improve all failure modes in systems that handle network traffic, aiming to ensure that each component responds predictably under error conditions and does not cascade failures to unrelated services. This includes validating interface contracts between critical products and establishing sensible defaults that allow traffic to continue even if a dependent subsystem fails.
In addition, the company is overhauling break-glass procedures and internal tool access to reduce circular dependencies that slowed incident response in past outages. Enhanced training and streamlined emergency access protocols are intended to help engineers react faster to critical failures without compromising security safeguards.
Cloudflare’s plan is being executed incrementally, with individual updates contributing to overall resilience rather than a single large rollout. The company expects that by the end of Q1 2026, all production systems will use the enhanced HMD configuration process, failure modes will be better defined and tested, and emergency response access will be improved.
These efforts come against a backdrop of increasing scrutiny. Outages at Cloudflare have attracted widespread attention, with incidents affecting major sites like LinkedIn, Zoom, and Shopify and prompting debate about the risks of centralized internet infrastructure. While some community reactions expressed frustration, many users on discussion platforms also welcomed Cloudflare’s candid acknowledgment of the issues and its commitment to structural improvements.
As Cloudflare works to rebuild confidence, the Code Orange: Fail Small initiative emphasizes the company’s shift toward more cautious deployment practices and stronger assumptions about failure, to contain issues before they escalate into global outages that disrupt broad segments of the internet ecosystem.
