Lesson in Error Management

A lot of developers complains about Golang.

“Why do I have to type if err != nil every single time?”

“It is too much typing. It is boring.”

But the recent Cloudflare outage shows why this “boring” code is actually a critical safety feature. Sometimes, the fastest path is the most dangerous.

1. The Breakdown: What Really Happened on November 18, 2025

A large part of the internet went down. It was not a hacker. It was a mistake in the code.

Cloudflare’s FL2 proxy engine (written in Rust) tried to read a configuration file that got too big due to a routine update. Instead of rejecting the file, the whole system crashed.

This exposed the simple, brutal truth about shortcuts.

2. The Code Philosophy: Convenience vs. Safeguard

🦀 The Rust Way: The Convenience Trap

Rust provides the .unwrap() shortcut. It’s designed to save typing, but it eliminates all safety checks.

It basically tells the computer: “I am sure this works. If I am wrong, crash the program immediately.”

It is very fast to write:

// Easy to write, but dangerous
let config = load_file().unwrap();

If load_file has an error, the server dies. This is the code that caused the global panic.

🐹 The Golang Way: Friction as a Guardrail

Go does not have a magic “crash button” like .unwrap(). To force a crash, a developer must explicitly choose to destroy the process:

// You must choose to crash
val, err := loadFile()
if err != nil {
    panic(err) // This feels wrong to write.
}

This code will not pass most serious code reviews, and linters will shout at you. Go forces you to handle the error, meaning the “lazy” path is actually the safe path.

Most Go developers will just log the error and continue:

if err != nil {
    logger.Error("File too big, skipping")
    return // The server stays ONLINE.
}

Rust makes crashing easy. Go makes crashing hard.

3. The Deeper Lesson: Survival Over Perfection

The argument is not just about the code shortcut. The outage highlighted two core engineering failures that must be avoided:

• The Design Flaw: The deepest problem was the hard-coded size limit for the config file. The system was too brittle (easily broken) by unexpected data.
• The Missing Protocol: The system failed to have a graceful failure protocol. It should have rejected the bad configuration and reverted to the last known good file.

How to Survive the Error

When a new config cannot be loaded, the operations team must be woken up, even if the user is not impacted. The system must “scream for help” without crashing:

• Log Loudly: Immediately write a FATAL log message, detailing why the configuration failed.
• Trigger an Alert: Increment a specific metric (e.g., config_load_failure_total) to trigger an immediate Pager Alert for the on-call engineer.
• Stay Alive: Keep the server running using the last known good config.

When you build systems for the entire internet, having to type a few extra lines of code is not boring—it’s system insurance.