<b>The purge that broke the site it was meant to fix</b>

<b>The purge that broke the site it was meant to fix</b>

An e-commerce site in Melbourne deployed a price change and did a hard purge of 200,000 product pages. The instant they did, every edge node had nothing cached, and 200,000 cold URLs all reached for origin at once. Origin, sized for a 95% cache-hit ratio, took the full firehose and returned 502s site-wide for four minutes during a sale.

We switched to soft purge. Instead of deleting objects, purged content gets marked stale: the edge keeps serving the old copy and revalidates it lazily on the next request. No cold cliff, no stampede.

The next 200k-page purge caused zero origin spike. Origin peak requests during purge fell from 200,000 in a burst to a smooth 1,400 RPS. No 502s, no lost sales.

The number that mattered: 0 errors on a purge that used to crash the site.