Your Production System Is Already Broken (Ask Cloudflare)
November 18, 2025: A chunk of the internet just stopped.
The culprit?1 A bad deployment pushed a feature file with more than 200 entries—exceeding the preallocated memory limit of exactly 200. The Bot Management system across every proxy panicked simultaneously. All failed.
No attack. No hardware failure. No buggy code. Every component worked as designed. Yet millions saw error pages for hours.
Dr. Richard Cook calls this “perfect failure”—when systems fail not because something breaks, but because components interact in unpredicted ways.
Here’s the uncomfortable truth: your production system is already running degraded. Multiple small failures exist, compensated by workarounds you don’t see. Catastrophe doesn’t need something new to break—just the right combination of existing conditions.
Stop asking “how do we prevent all failures?” Start asking “how do we ensure failures don’t cascade?”
(From the Book How Software Fails)