TWICE IN THE PAST three weeks, huge swaths of the internet have suddenly gone black. In a matter of minutes, the platforms that millions use every day — among them LinkedIn, Spotify, ChatGPT, and so many others — became unreachable. Even companies and newsrooms that rely on Cloudflare for stability were caught off guard.
Both seemed global meltdowns. But each was caused by something small: routine internal updates inside Cloudflare. In one case, the company updated permissions for a database system. In the other, a long-dormant bug surprisingly kicked in. Individually, the problems were nonproblems. But taken together, they somehow managed to strangle a large part of the internet traffic around the world.
To grasp why it keeps happening, one needs to consider how the internet has evolved and why centralization has silently created new single points of failure.
Is a long-obsolete vision of the decentralized internet
To most non-engineers, the Internet is envisioned as a gigantic, open network of computers with many interlinking paths, so that no one breakdown could halt everything. Actually, this picture is true in reality for the early decades of the web. In fact, the original Internet was designed to be decentralized and resilient.
But the modern internet is little like that at all. In recent decades, a series of new layers has been built atop the core infrastructure-layers that function in highly centralized ways. A small handful of companies are now responsible for managing, optimizing, routing, and securing an enormous share of global traffic, and one of the most influential among them is Cloudflare.
While Cloudflare is a private company, the role it plays is not dissimilar to any utility provider. Not unlike the operator of a power grid, Cloudflare keeps the digital world running. And this did not happen overnight.
How Performance and Security Drove Cloudflare’s Rise
In the old days of the Web, websites were done on a single server in one city. If your server was in Bengaluru, then it would load fast for users in that vicinity but painfully slow elsewhere, like Europe or the United States.
Another big challenge was security. The IP address of a website was available to all, hence to the attackers too. Physical firewalls helped, but they cannot prevent large-scale DDoS attacks that overwhelm servers with fake traffic until they crash.
Such performance-related problems were solved by the use of Content Delivery Networks, which stored the cached version of a website on different servers around the world from companies like Akamai. This helped major business, but such technologies were unaffordable for smaller sites.
Cloudflare fundamentally changed this dynamic by marrying the performance capabilities of CDNs with advanced security capabilities and opening them up to anyone. Its reverse-proxy architecture cloaked a site’s true IP, filtered out malicious traffic, absorbed attacks, and accelerated performance. Easy onboarding and a free tier helped Cloudflare quickly become one of the foundational layers of the modern internet.
Overview of how Cloudflare works as the middle layer of the internet:
Today, when accessing a website behind Cloudflare, your request makes a hop to a nearby Cloudflare server and does not have to make it all the way to the origin hosting the website.
Cloudflare checks whether your request is safe.
If it passes, cached content is loaded instantly.
If Cloudflare suspects suspicious activity, it will block it or issue a challenge.
Because Cloudflare uses anycast routing, all their servers worldwide share the same IP. Your device will automatically connect to the nearest available server and be able to load websites much faster. All these translate into huge gains for individual websites in terms of both speed and security.
But as Cloudflare became the default choice for millions of websites, a quiet centralization was forming beneath the web.
The Centralization Paradox: Safer Websites, Riskier Internet
Cloudflare now processes about one-fifth of all global internet requests. Banks, governments, the media, major e-commerce sites, and AI services sit behind its network. About half of the world’s top 10,000 websites rely on it.
And that dominance exists because scale matters.
Very few firms can absorb large-scale DDoS attacks.
Its unparalleled view of traffic gives Cloudflare its unparalleled level of threat intelligence.
Larger networks are Safer Networks.
With that efficiency comes a new vulnerability: if Cloudflare goes down, the websites behind it effectively disappear. Their servers may be operating perfectly, but the world cannot get to them.
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What the recent outages revealed
Cloudflare uses a system called Quicksilver that instantly replicates configuration changes across their global network. Usually, this works flawlessly. But the moment a faulty update enters the system, in seconds it’s everywhere. In the outage this time, a small internal file-a kind of bot protection file-had suddenly ballooned in size because of duplicated code. This caused it to bump up its memory limits and unleash widespread errors; for over three hours, large chunks of the online world froze.
The irony is remarkable: Cloudflare routinely shuts down massive cyberattacks involving millions of infected devices. Yet it wasn’t an attack that brought it down; it was a small, routine mistake. a future of efficiency and fragility. The old internet was about decentralization. The new internet runs on speed and security and convenience — and of course, all that naturally concentrates power in a few key global infrastructure providers.
It makes the individual sites stronger, taking away redundancies of the overall system. And it’s what we’re seeing increasingly in the world built for efficiency: even the tiniest misstep ripples out into a global outage. The challenge ahead is clear: how to preserve the strengths of centralization while reducing the fragility it creates.
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