Breaking: Cloudflare Completes Major Network Resiliency Project
Cloudflare has officially concluded a sweeping internal engineering initiative code-named "Code Orange: Fail Small," designed to prevent a repeat of the two global outages that struck in late 2025. The project, which spanned more than two quarters, focused on safer configuration changes, reduced failure impact, and overhauled incident management.
"This was an all-hands engineering effort that fundamentally changes how we deploy configurations across our network. We're now shipping changes in a way that catches problems before they affect customer traffic," said Cloudflare's Chief Technology Officer.
Background: The Outages That Triggered the Overhaul
On November 18 and December 5, 2025, Cloudflare experienced two global outages that impacted millions of websites. The root causes were traced to configuration changes that propagated instantly across the network without proper health checks. One incident involved a data file, while the other stemmed from a control flag in the global configuration system.
Prior to Code Orange, configuration deployments often reached the entire network in seconds, leaving no time to catch dangerous changes. The company acknowledged that these incidents were completely avoidable with better deployment practices.
Key Changes Made Under Code Orange
Safer Configuration Deployments
Cloudflare has now adopted a "health-mediated deployment" methodology for all configuration changes. Instead of pushing updates network-wide instantly, teams must bundle changes into packages that are released gradually, with real-time health monitoring at each step.
"We've built a new internal system called Snapstone that makes this possible for every team. Before Snapstone, doing progressive rollouts for configurations required huge effort per team, and it wasn't consistently applied. Now it's the default," explained the VP of Engineering.
Snapstone: The Core of the New System
Snapstone is a unified platform that bundles configuration changes into releasable packages. It then orchestrates a gradual rollout with automated health checks and instant rollback if anomalies are detected. The system is flexible enough to handle any type of configuration unit – whether data files, control flags, or other settings.
"What makes Snapstone powerful isn't just fixing past outages; it allows teams to define any configuration unit that needs health mediation. This means we're resilient against future failure modes we haven't even seen yet," added the CTO.
Revised Incident Management and Break Glass Procedures
Beyond deployment changes, Cloudflare overhauled its "break glass" emergency access protocols and incident management workflows. The company also introduced measures to prevent configuration drift and regressions over time, ensuring that improvements remain in place.
Communications during outages have also been strengthened, with faster and more transparent updates to customers.
What This Means for Cloudflare Customers
For businesses and website operators relying on Cloudflare, the immediate result is a significantly more resilient network. Most internal configuration changes no longer reach the network instantly. Instead, they are rolled out progressively, with real-time health monitoring catching problems before any traffic is affected.
"Customers should notice greater uptime and fewer unexpected disruptions. Our goal is that no single configuration mistake can ever take down the network again," said the VP of Engineering. The changes apply to all product teams that were directly involved in the November and December incidents.
While the project is complete, Cloudflare stresses that resiliency is never truly finished. The company has embedded these processes into its standard development lifecycle to prevent future incidents.
This article will be updated as more details emerge.