Cloudflare intends to "Fail Small" after series of global outages

"Cloudflare announces a new resilience plan called Fail Small, following several global outages in a short period of time. The incidents were not caused by external attacks, but by errors within its own infrastructure and processes. Cloudflare acknowledges that configuration changes rolled out globally in one go had too great an impact. As a result, relatively minor errors escalated into a large-scale outage."

"This outage comes at a time when pressure on internet infrastructure is increasing. The Cloudflare Radar Year in Review 2025 shows that global internet traffic grew by about 20 percent last year. This growth is increasingly less driven by end users and streaming services alone, and increasingly by automated traffic. Bots and AI-related crawlers cause continuously high volumes and unpredictable peaks, which structurally increases the load on networks."

"Against this backdrop, the recent disruptions were particularly burdensome. According to Computing, although the incidents in November and December had different immediate causes, they shared the same underlying factor: a configuration change that was rolled out globally shortly before the outage. According to that publication, this revealed a structural difference between the way Cloudflare manages software updates and how configuration changes have been implemented to date."

Cloudflare experienced several global outages caused by internal infrastructure and process errors rather than external attacks. Configuration changes rolled out globally in one go amplified relatively minor errors into large-scale outages. Global internet traffic rose about 20 percent, with automated traffic, bots, and AI-related crawlers producing sustained high volumes and unpredictable peaks that increase network load. The network lacked mechanisms to keep errors local, causing widespread platform impact across DNS, content distribution, and security services. Fail Small defines a resilience approach that accepts inevitable failures while structurally limiting their impact through improved change management and local failure containment.

Read at Techzine Global