On June 12, a widespread outage affected Google Cloud Platform (GCP) users due to a bug in a new release impacting global load balancers, highlighting the critical role of feature flags in modern software deployment. Despite GCP's advanced engineering capabilities, the incident underscored the vulnerability inherent in rapid code deployment, as Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) pipelines can lead to loss of control once code is live. Feature flags provide a solution, offering a control plane that allows teams to manage changes incrementally, react to issues swiftly, and roll back deployments without redeployment. By using feature flags, GCP could have restricted the release to a small percentage of users, monitored metrics more effectively, and contained the issue without a full-scale outage. The narrative emphasizes that feature flags are not limited to front-end applications but are essential for managing infrastructure updates and high-risk production releases, providing teams with the confidence to deploy changes safely while maintaining the ability to swiftly recover from unforeseen problems.