--- title: The insane engineering behind Cloudflare | daily.dev description: Cloudflare suffered two major global outages in late 2025, both triggered by small configuration changes that propagated instantly across its global network.... canonical: https://daily.dev/posts/the-insane-engineering-behind-cloudflare-drdg3ubve twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:site: @dailydotdev og:type: website og:site_name: daily.dev og:title: The insane engineering behind Cloudflare | daily.dev og:description: Cloudflare suffered two major global outages in late 2025, both triggered by small configuration changes that propagated instantly across its global network.... og:url: https://daily.dev/posts/the-insane-engineering-behind-cloudflare-drdg3ubve og:image: https://api.daily.dev/og/posts/DRdg3uBvE.png og:image:alt: The insane engineering behind Cloudflare og:image:width: 1200 og:image:height: 630 og:locale: en --- > ## Documentation Index > Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://daily.dev/llms.txt > Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further. # The insane engineering behind Cloudflare **[Awesome](https://daily.dev/sources/awesome-coding)** · 10 min read · 26 upvotes · 0 comments ## Summary Cloudflare suffered two major global outages in late 2025, both triggered by small configuration changes that propagated instantly across its global network. The first outage stemmed from a ClickHouse permission change that caused a duplicated feature file to exceed the proxy's hard limit, crashing its Rust-based proxy due to unhandled errors. The second outage occurred when disabling an internal WAF testing tool exposed a Lua bug in the older proxy. Both incidents shared the same architectural flaw: configuration changes bypassed gradual rollout systems and reached the entire network immediately, with no graceful fallback. In response, Cloudflare launched the 'Code Orange Fail Small' program, introducing Snapstore for versioned configuration deployments with canary rollouts, defining three failure strategies (fail stale, fail open, fail closed), and implementing blast radius isolation to limit the scope of any single failure. ## Full article daily.dev links to this article rather than hosting it. Read it at the original source: ## Similar posts on daily.dev - [Code Orange: Fail Small — Our resilience plan following recent incidents](https://daily.dev/posts/code-orange-fail-small-our-resilience-plan-following-recent-incidents-gsllaj6ja) · Cloudflare · 24 upvotes · 1 comments - [Cloudflare Launches ‘Code Orange: Fail Small’ Resilience Plan After Multiple Global Outages](https://daily.dev/posts/cloudflare-launches-code-orange-fail-small-resilience-plan-after-multiple-global-outages-odnhxfcwg) · InfoQ · 1 upvotes · 0 comments - [Cloudflare Outage. What exactly happened?](https://daily.dev/posts/cloudflare-outage-what-exactly-happened--eheuucb6n) · Code Like A Girl · 2 upvotes · 0 comments --- Tags: [#distributed-systems](https://daily.dev/tags/distributed-systems), [#cloudflare](https://daily.dev/tags/cloudflare) [View this post on daily.dev](https://daily.dev/posts/the-insane-engineering-behind-cloudflare-drdg3ubve) ```json {"@context":"https://schema.org","@graph":[{"@type":"Organization","@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization","name":"daily.dev","url":"https://daily.dev","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://daily.dev/apple-touch-icon.png","width":180,"height":180},"sameAs":["https://twitter.com/dailydotdev","https://github.com/dailydotdev","https://www.linkedin.com/company/daily-dev-ltd"]},{"@type":"WebSite","@id":"https://daily.dev/#website","url":"https://daily.dev","name":"daily.dev","publisher":{"@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization"},"potentialAction":{"@type":"SearchAction","target":{"@type":"EntryPoint","urlTemplate":"https://daily.dev/search?q={search_term_string}"},"query-input":"required name=search_term_string"}}]} {"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"TechArticle","headline":"The insane engineering behind Cloudflare","url":"https://daily.dev/posts/the-insane-engineering-behind-cloudflare-drdg3ubve","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://daily.dev/posts/the-insane-engineering-behind-cloudflare-drdg3ubve"},"datePublished":"2026-07-31T10:22:28.573Z","dateModified":"2026-08-01T08:17:30.066Z","description":"Cloudflare suffered two major global outages in late 2025, both triggered by small configuration changes that propagated instantly across its global network....","image":"https://i.ytimg.com/vi/W6iMPAGY36c/sddefault.jpg","thumbnailUrl":"https://i.ytimg.com/vi/W6iMPAGY36c/sddefault.jpg","isAccessibleForFree":true,"articleSection":"Awesome","inLanguage":"en","publisher":{"@type":"Organization","name":"daily.dev","url":"https://daily.dev","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://daily.dev/apple-touch-icon.png","width":180,"height":180}},"author":{"@type":"Organization","name":"Awesome","logo":"https://media.daily.dev/image/upload/s--mj_0cdD8--/f_auto/v1710506099/logos/awesome-coding","url":"https://daily.dev/sources/awesome-coding"},"commentCount":0,"discussionUrl":"https://daily.dev/posts/the-insane-engineering-behind-cloudflare-drdg3ubve","interactionStatistic":[{"@type":"InteractionCounter","interactionType":{"@type":"LikeAction"},"userInteractionCount":26},{"@type":"InteractionCounter","interactionType":{"@type":"CommentAction"},"userInteractionCount":0}],"keywords":"distributed-systems,cloudflare","timeRequired":"PT10M","video":{"@type":"VideoObject","name":"The insane engineering behind Cloudflare","description":"Cloudflare suffered two major global outages in late 2025, both triggered by small configuration changes that propagated instantly across its global network....","thumbnailUrl":"https://i.ytimg.com/vi/W6iMPAGY36c/sddefault.jpg","uploadDate":"2026-07-31T10:22:28.573Z","duration":"PT10M","url":"https://api.daily.dev/r/DRdg3uBvE","embedUrl":"https://www.youtube.com/embed/W6iMPAGY36c"}} {"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"BreadcrumbList","itemListElement":[{"@type":"ListItem","position":1,"name":"Home","item":"https://daily.dev"},{"@type":"ListItem","position":2,"name":"Awesome","item":"https://daily.dev/sources/awesome-coding"},{"@type":"ListItem","position":3,"name":"The insane engineering behind Cloudflare"}]} ```