The blog post chronicles the challenges Cockroach Labs faced in stabilizing their CockroachDB database, which led to designating its instability as a "code yellow" issue, indicating a critical company-wide concern. Initially, stability was assumed to be a natural outcome of ongoing development, but frequent issues with performance and stability, such as deadlocks and data corruption, prompted a reassessment. The team identified process and management faults, such as the rapid pace of development and lack of clear leadership, as primary causes of instability. Their strategy involved splitting the master and development branches, appointing Peter Mattis to lead a focused stability team, and reducing the core team size to enable more scrutiny over changes. Communication was key, with internal transparency maintained and external announcements made to uphold community trust. Technical efforts included refining snapshot handling, lock refactoring, and optimizing Raft, the consensus algorithm. Ultimately, the team met their stability goals, demonstrating the value of focused leadership, structured processes, and transparent communication, although they acknowledged the inevitability of initial instability in complex distributed systems.