Thoughts & Insights

How a “Simple Blank Page” in a React App Exposed a CDN + IIS Failure Pattern We Didn’t Expect and How We Fixed It

A seemingly random blank page in a production React application exposed a deeper infrastructure failure between CloudFront and IIS. What appeared to be a frontend issue was actually a CDN caching problem triggered during IIS restarts, where HTML responses were mistakenly cached for JavaScript assets. Here’s how we diagnosed the failure pattern and redesigned the system for resilience instead of relying on cache invalidation.