We have declared “Code Orange: Fail Small” to focus everyone at Cloudflare on a set of high-priority workstreams with one simple goal: ensure that the cause of our last two global outages never happens again.

Cloudflare's platform is a leading provider of internet security and performance solutions, offering insights into web security, content delivery, and DNS management. Through documentation, blog posts, and webinars, Cloudflare provides insights into protecting websites and applications from cyber threats and improving performance. Developers and IT professionals can learn about CDN (Content Delivery Network), DDoS mitigation, and firewall configurations to secure and accelerate web traffic.

Cloudflare

Cloudflare declared "Code Orange: Fail Small" following two major outages in November and December 2025. Both incidents were caused by instantaneous global deployment of configuration changes that broke the network. The resilience plan focuses on three areas: implementing controlled rollouts for configuration changes (similar to existing software deployment processes), reviewing and improving failure modes across all systems to handle errors gracefully, and fixing break glass procedures to remove circular dependencies. The goal is to ensure configuration changes pass through testing gates before global deployment, preventing single changes from taking down the entire network.

Code Orange: Fail Small — Our resilience plan following recent incidents

We will change how we deploy configuration updates at Cloudflare

How will we address failure modes between services?

<p>It’s hard to do, but at their scale and with their outages, it’s important to gradually roll out changes, including to DNS.</p>
