Cloudflare Stumbles Again, Raising Questions about the Web’s Fragile Backbone

There are mornings when one wakes up on the other side of the bed, and then there are mornings like LinkedIn is down, Zoom is down, and half the internet refuses to load, which makes you even crankier. It makes you wonder if your WiFi is broken or the digital universe is having a day off.

Unfortunately, it was Cloudflare, once again. For the second time this month, the company that was supposed to keep the internet standing, accidentally messed up.

What Actually Happened?

On the morning of Friday, a bunch of major platforms like LinkedIn, Zoom, Canva, Shopify, Groww, and even the incident-tracking site Downdetector experienced disruption due to a fresh outage at Cloudflare. The disruption stayed about 30 minutes and was resolved after 9am GMT. 

Cloudflare did not point the outage to a cyberattack. Instead, the problem was due to changes made to its firewall when dealing with a security vulnerability in the software that had just been found. It all happened in an attempt to protect customers, which accidentally resulted in an extensive disruption.

This event comes shortly after a huge outage in mid-November that was associated with a massive auto-generated configuration file that crashed the system, while managing threat traffic across multiple Cloudflare services.

The outage affected platforms like X, Spotify, OpenAI, and even multiplayer games like League of Legends. In comparison to that disruption, Friday’s problem was smaller, but it was significant enough for Downdetector to log over 4,500 outage reports as soon as its own site came back up.

The Importance of this Issue

Cloudflare has for an extended period positioned itself as the support structure for a robust and high-performance internet. It is a major contributor to the company’s cybersecurity, the rapid delivery of content, and defenses against enormous cyberattacks. However, the occurrence of two outages in very close intervals raises doubts.

UCL professor Steven Murdoch said,

“I think people will start asking questions now that there have been these two outages in a short period of time. They’re not very happy, and Cloudflare isn’t very happy either – they’re apologetic. But it’s too early to say whether there’s a systemic problem, such as bad software practices, or it’s just bad luck”.

The concern is justified indeed. Cloudflare’s network is responsible for nearly 20% of all websites, hence its robust performance is a matter of global digital life.

The wider issue is also changing. The experts are pointing out that the infrastructure of mega-providers like Cloudflare, Amazon Web Services (AWS) and others has brought about an internet that is heavily centralized, one with a single point of failure that can cause the whole world disruption. As DNS and infrastructure specialist Michał Woźniak said,

“This again shows how brittle is the big tech internet. This is the fourth major global outage, large enough to be noticed by non-technical media and affect regular people around the world, since 20 October.”

Centralization Effects

The recent outage to AWS, which occurred in October and were of such magnitude that more than 2,000 companies were affected, have opened up the argument once again on whether web infrastructure has become too much monopolised by a few companies. Whenever these companies encounter difficulties, their millions of users will suffer the impact globally.

Woźniak indicates that Cloudflare’s reliability marketing is now subject to scrutiny. The company’s scale, which is nearly 300,000 customers across 125 countries, generating over $500 million per quarter, has changed the narrative. He said,

“These companies have become too big to not fail. And because they handle so much traffic, when they do fail, this immediately becomes a massive problem”.

When they collapse, the effects are extensive.

On the other hand, Murdoch claims there is a paradoxical benefit, where failures make everybody aware of how important Cloudflare is. Last year, following the Fire’s outage, its stock rose, and investors perceived power, not weakness.

If everyone feels impacted when you fall, it signals your significance. Murdoch said,

“When AWS went down, their share price went up, because people realised how many people are using them. In some ways [the outage] is great marketing, because you see how many people are using Cloudflare”.

The Internet’s Weakness Is Visible

Let’s face it, the recent failures of Cloudflare are not the issue, they are just a sign. The problem lies in the internet’s heavy reliance on a few infrastructure giants. When we continue to merge security, bandwidth, DNS, and traffic management through a few companies, the breakdowns become huge when something goes wrong.

Cloudflare’s errors not only bring inconvenience to users, but it also reveals the inherent weakness of a system that is designed for speed and convenience rather than decentralization and resilience. Cloudflare will bounce back, it always does, but the rest of the world needs to be alert.

The outages are minor compared to what could happen, and the need to diversify, distribute, and reinforce internet infrastructure has never been more obvious. If today’s setback teaches anything, it’s that the giants sustaining the web can fall too. And when they do, the whole world experiences the shock.