The internet just had another wake-up call. Cloudflare's massive outage this morning knocked out X, ChatGPT, Spotify, Canva, and even DownDetector for hours, marking the third major infrastructure collapse in just one month. With 20% of the web running through Cloudflare's network and serving 35% of Fortune 500 companies, this latest failure has experts sounding alarms about the dangerous concentration of web infrastructure among just a handful of providers.
The morning started like any other until suddenly it didn't. Users trying to access X found error pages. ChatGPT went dark. Spotify stopped streaming. Even DownDetector, the go-to site for tracking outages, was itself down. The culprit? A single configuration file that grew too large and crashed Cloudflare's systems.
"The root cause of the outage was a configuration file that is automatically generated to manage threat traffic," Cloudflare spokesperson Jackie Dutton explained to The Verge. "The file grew beyond an expected size of entries and triggered a crash in the software system that handles traffic for a number of Cloudflare's services."
It sounds almost absurd that a file getting too big could bring down chunks of the internet, but when you're operating at Cloudflare's scale, small problems become massive headaches fast. "When you operate infrastructure at Cloudflare's scale, even small deviations can have outsized consequences," Rob Lee, chief of AI and research at the SANS Institute, told The Verge. "These platforms are built for speed, so anything that delays or halts decision making can cascade quickly."
This wasn't just bad timing - it was part of a disturbing pattern. Within the span of just one month, we've now seen Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services both suffer major outages that knocked entire swaths of the internet offline. The message is becoming crystal clear: the web has become dangerously concentrated among just a few massive players.
"The entire stack, practically speaking, is owned by 3-4 players," Signal president Meredith Whittaker wrote after the recent AWS outage took down her secure messaging app. Her company, she explained, didn't really have any other choice but to rely on a major cloud provider.
That's exactly what has Mehdi Daoudi, CEO of internet monitoring platform Catchpoint, worried. "Everybody's putting all their eggs in one basket, and then they're surprised when there is a problem," Daoudi told . "It's on the company's side to make sure that they have redundancy and resiliency."
