Cloudflare outage on December 5, 2025

📝 Discussion Summary (Click to expand)

The three most prevalent themes in the discussion regarding the Cloudflare outage are:

1. Failure in Deployment Safety and Rollback Procedures

There is widespread criticism regarding Cloudflare's decision-making process during the incident, especially their choice to continue a deployment or perform a "roll forward" correction using a system that had recently caused an outage, instead of immediately rolling back.

Supporting Quote: The sentiment is captured by a user observing the incident response: "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," stated by "flaminHotSpeedo."

2. The Role of Language Choice (Strong Typing vs. Dynamic Typing)

The discussion frequently revisited arguments about static vs. dynamic typing, prompted by the post-mortem noting that the Lua scripting vulnerability would have been prevented by strong type systems, like Rust (which was involved in a previous incident). However, some users argued that weak programming practices override language safety features.

Supporting Quote: A user noted the similarity to the previous incident, concluding that language alone is insufficient: "This is the exact same type of error that happened in their Rust code last time. Strong type systems don’t protect you from lazy programming," said "skywhopper."
Counterpoint Quote: Another user pointed out the practical difference in error visibility: "It's not remotely the same type of error -- error non-handling is very visible in the Rust code, while the Lua code shows the happy path, with no indication that it could explode at runtime," argued "inejge."

3. Cloudflare's Criticality and Acceptable Downtime

Many users expressed frustration over the perceived unreliability of a service deemed critical infrastructure, contrasting this with the relatively long detection and mitigation times (around 20 minutes end-to-end). There was debate over whether 30 minutes of downtime is acceptable for a company positioned as "The Internet."

Supporting Quote: A key assertion about necessary standards: "AWS or Cloudflare have positioned themselves as The Internet so they need to be held to a higher standard," asserted "bombcar."
Counter-view Quote: Conversely, a user downplayed the severity, arguing for pragmatism: "I see lots of people complaining about this down time but in actuality is it really that big a deal to have 30 minutes of down time or whatever. It's not like anything behind cloudflare is 'mission critical'," stated "morpheos137" (though this was later contended).

🚀 Project Ideas

Config Change Impact Analyzer (CCIA)

Summary

A tool designed to correlate global configuration changes (like the one that caused the outage via Lua exceptions) with real-time telemetry signals before full propagation or immediately upon detection.
Core value proposition: Drastically reduce the time between a config deployment and the decision to roll back by providing intelligent, context-aware alerting tied directly to configuration provenance.

Details

Key	Value
Target Audience	SREs, DevOps Engineers, and Incident Commanders at companies using large-scale, instantly propagating configuration systems (like Cloudflare, large CDNs, or distributed database clusters).
Core Feature	Real-time ingestion of configuration deployment logs, mapping the deployment event to specific metrics (e.g., 5xx error rate spikes, unusual Lua exceptions logs). Automated calculation of the "distance" (latency/errors) between config deployment and error manifestation.
Tech Stack	Event Stream Processing (e.g., Kafka/Pulsar), Language focused on high-throughput telemetry processing (Rust/Go), Time-series database (Prometheus/VictoriaMetrics), Web UI (React).
Difficulty	Medium
Monetization	Hobby

Notes

Why HN commenters would love it: Addresses the core frustration expressed by testplzignore and Scaevolus: "They really need to figure out a way to correlate global configuration changes to the errors they trigger as fast as possible."
Potential for discussion or practical utility: This directly tackles the "2 minutes for automated alerts to fire is terrible" problem by enabling near-instantaneous correlation and providing data necessary to justify a rollback before the change fully propagates.

Safe-Rollback Strategy Visualizer (SRSV)

Summary

A service that models the dependency graph and state changes resulting from a global configuration push or code rollback action prior to execution. It assesses rollback viability and potential secondary failures.
Core value proposition: Provides SRE teams evidence-based justification (or warning) on whether a rollback is safer than rolling forward, accounting for changes merged since the broken release candidate.

Details

Key	Value
Target Audience	Infrastructure Architects and Senior SREs responsible for planning high-risk deployments or responding to critical incidents where rollback vs. roll-forward decisions are being debated.
Core Feature	Generates a dependency map showing which configuration components/code changes have been merged since the target rollback point. Simulates the resulting system state for key health metrics, checking for "novel states" (`crote`, `newsoftheday`).
Tech Stack	Graph Database (Neo4j/Dgraph) for dependency tracking, Static Analysis Engine (for code lineage), Python/Pydantic for defining input states.
Difficulty	High
Monetization	Hobby

Notes

Why HN commenters would love it: Directly addresses the difficulty of rolling back at scale (crote, newsoftheday, jamesog), especially when intervening code has merged, turning simple rollbacks into "effectively rolling forwards."
Potential for discussion or practical utility: Forces teams to operationalize the abstract concept of rollback integrity, leading to better engineering consciousness about deployment state management.

Internal Tool Health Monitoring Policy Engine (IT-HMPE)

Summary

A strict policy enforcement tool focused solely on monitoring and alerting on the health of internal testing and debugging tools used during or immediately following a deployment.
Core value proposition: Prevents "warning signs" from being ignored by enforcing immediate process halts or alerts if internal tooling shows anomalous behavior concurrent with external deployment activity.

Details

Key	Value
Target Audience	Release Managers and Observability teams responsible for approving the deployment pipeline steps.
Core Feature	Ingests logs/metrics from internal testing/staging environments or tools (like the WAF rules testing tool mentioned by Cloudflare). If Deployment X is active, and Internal Tool Y reports an error spike, IT-HMPE immediately triggers a high-severity alert or hard-stop to the deployment system, referencing the specific incident report logic (`philipwhiuk`, `shadowgovt` analogy of ignoring the "check engine" light).
Tech Stack	Simple event correlation engine, lightweight monitoring agent (e.g., Go binary), Policy-as-Code framework (e.g., OPA/Rego).
Difficulty	Low
Monetization	Hobby

Notes

Why HN commenters would love it: It institutionalizes the immediate reaction to obvious warning signs lamented by users like philipwhiuk and shadowgovt, preventing the organization from making the "cowboy decision" to disable a failing internal tool to push production changes.
Potential for discussion or practical utility: It establishes a clear, non-negotiable SLO for internal tooling health during active change events, a critical gap exposed when the team disabled their testing tool instead of halting the main rollout.