by dkyc 14 hours ago
One thing to keep in mind when judging what's 'appropriate' is that Cloudflare was effectively responding to an ongoing security incident outside of their control (the React Server RCE vulnerability). Part of Cloudlfare's value proposition is being quick to react to such threats. That changes the equation a bit: any hour you wait longer to deploy, your customers are actively getting hacked through a known high-severity vulnerability.
In this case it's not just a matter of 'hold back for another day to make sure it's done right', like when adding a new feature to a normal SaaS application. In Cloudflare's case moving slower also comes with a real cost.
That isn't to say it didn't work out badly this time, just that the calculation is a bit different.
To clarify, I'm not trying to imply that I definitely wouldn't have made the same decision, or that cowboy decisions aren't ever the right call.
However, this preliminary report doesn't really justify the decision to use the same deployment system responsible for the 11/18 outage. Deployment safety should have been the focus of this report, not the technical details. My question that I want answered isn't "are there bugs in Cloudflare's systems" it's "has Cloudflare learned from it's recent mistakes to respond appropriately to events"
> doesn't really justify the decision to use the same deployment system responsible for the 11/18 outage
There’s no other deployment system available. There’s a single system for config deployment and it’s all that was available as they haven’t yet done the progressive roll out implementation yet.
> There’s no other deployment system available.
Hindsight is always 20/20, but I don't know how that sort of oversight could happen in an organization whose business model rides on reliability. Small shops understand the importance of safeguards such as progressive deployments or one-box-style deployments with a baking period, so why not the likes of Cloudflare? Don't they have anyone on their payroll who warns about the risks of global deployments without safeguards?
Ok. Sure But shouldn't they have some beta/staging/test area they could deploy to, run tests for an hour then do the global blast?
Config changes are distinctly more difficult to have that set up for and as the blog says they’re working on it. They just don’t have it ready yet and are pausing any more config changes until it’s set up. They just did this one in response to try to mitigate an ongoing security vulnerability and missed the mark.
I’m happy to see they’re changing their systems to fail open which is one of the things I mentioned in the conversation about their last outage.
The 11/18 outage was 2.5 weeks ago. Any learning & changes they made as a result for that probably didn't make its way yet to production.
Particularly if we're asking them to be careful & deliberate about deployments, hard to ask them fast-track this.
the cve isn't a zero day though how come cloudflare werent at the table for early disclosure?
Do you have a public source about an embargo period for this one? I wasn't able to find one
Considering there were patched libraries at the time of disclosure, those libraries' authors must have been informed ahead of time.
https://react.dev/blog/2025/12/03/critical-security-vulnerab...
Privately Disclosed: Nov 29 Fix pushed: Dec 1 Publicly disclosed: Dec 3
Then even in the worst case scenario, they were addressing this issue two days after it was publicly disclosed. So this wasn't a "rush to fix the zero day ASAP" scenario, which makes it harder to justify ignoring errors that started occuring in a small scale rollout.
Cloudflare had already decided this was a rule that could be rolled out using their gradual deployment system. They did not view it as being so urgent that it required immediate global roll out.
Clownflare did what it does best, mess up and break everything. It will keep happening again and again
Indeed, but it is what it is. Cloudflare comes out of my budget, and even with downtime, its better than not paying them. Do I want to deal with what Cloudflare offers? I do not, I have higher value work to focus on. I want to pay someone else to deal with this, and just like when cloud providers are down, it'll be back up eventually. Grab a coffee or beer and hang; we aren't savings lives, we're just building websites. This is not laziness or nihilism, but simply being rational and pragmatic.
> Do I want to deal with what Cloudflare offers? I do not, I have higher value work to focus on. I want to pay someone else to deal with this, and just like when cloud providers are down, it'll be back up eventually.
This is specious reasoning. How come I had to endure a total outage due to the rollout of a mitigation of a Nextjs vulnerability when my organization doesn't even own any React app, let alone a Nextjs one?
Also specious reasoning #2, not wanting to maintain a service does not justify blindly rolling out config changes globally without any safeguards.
If you are a customer of Cloudflare, and not happy, I encourage you to evaluate other providers more to your liking. Perhaps you'll find someone more fitting to your use case and operational preferences, but perhaps not. My day job org pays Cloudflare hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, and am satisfied with how they operate. Everyone has choice, exercise it if you choose. I'm sure your account exec would be happy to take the feedback. Feedback, including yours, is valuable and important to attempt to improve the product and customer experience (imho; i of course do not speak for Cloudflare, only myself).
As a recovering devops/infra person from a lifetime ago (who has, much to my heartbreak, broken prod more than once), perhaps that is where my grace in this regard comes from. Systems and their components break, systems and processes are imperfect, and urgency can lead to unexpected failure. Sometimes its Cloudflare, other times it's Azure, GCP, Github, etc. You can always use something else, but most of us continue to pick the happy path of "it works most of the time, and sometimes it does not." Hopefully the post mortem has action items to improve the safeguards you mention. If there are no process and technical improvements from the outage, certainly, that is where the failure lies (imho).
China-nexus cyber threat groups rapidly exploit React2Shell vulnerability (CVE-2025-55182) - https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/security/china-nexus-cyber-thre... - December 4th, 2025
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...