Do you ever pause shipping new features just to fix broken code?

we pushed out new features for four months straight to stay ahead of competitors. it helped with initial growth, but the code got super messy and fragile.

eventually, adding one small thing would break two other parts of the app. we had to stop all new updates for three weeks just to clean up the code and add proper tests. it slowed us down briefly, but bugs dropped significantly and building things is much faster now.

how do you deal with messy code before it completely slows down your app?