Technologies are described herein for maintaining packet order in network flows over an autonomous network. A sequence number is generated for each data packet in the network flow. The data packets are transmitted from a source endpoint to a destination endpoint accompanied by the sequence number. When a data packet is received at the destination endpoint, the sequence number is utilized to determine whether the packet has arrived out-of-order. If the received data packet is out-of-order, the packet is buffered for a specific period of time, or until the next sequential packet in the network flow is received. If the next sequential packet is received within the time period, the received packet and any buffered packets are delivered in sequence number order to a program executing on the destination endpoint. If the time period expires before receiving the next sequential data packet, the buffered packet(s) are delivered to the program.