Code Orange: Fail Small is complete. The result is a stronger Cloudflare network
Cloudflare has completed its 'Code Orange: Fail Small' initiative, aimed at enhancing the resilience, security, and reliability of its network following global outages in November and December 2025. The improvements focus on safer configuration changes, reduced failure impact, and better incident response procedures. These changes are designed to prevent past outages and improve service continuity for customers.
- ▪Cloudflare completed the 'Code Orange: Fail Small' project to prevent the global outages that occurred on November 18 and December 5, 2025.
- ▪The company introduced Snapstone, a system that enables safe, progressive rollout of configuration changes with real-time health monitoring and automated rollback.
- ▪Product teams have reduced failure impact by removing non-essential dependencies and implementing 'fail stale,' 'fail open,' or 'fail close' strategies during incidents.
- ▪Cloudflare has standardized health-mediated deployment for all configuration changes, ensuring consistent and safer deployments across the network.
- ▪The improvements include updated 'break glass' procedures and enhanced customer communication during outages.
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Code Orange: Fail Small is complete. The result is a stronger Cloudflare network2026-05-01Jeremy Hartman8 min readOver the past two and a bit quarters, we've undertaken an intensive engineering effort, internally code-named "Code Orange: Fail Small", focused on making Cloudflare's infrastructure more resilient, secure, and reliable for every customer.Earlier this month, the Cloudflare team finished this work.While improving resiliency will never be a “job done” and will always be a top priority across our development lifecycle, we have now completed the work that would have avoided the November 18, 2025 and December 5, 2025 global outages.This work focused on several key areas: safer configuration changes, reducing the impact of failure, and revising our “break glass” procedures and…
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