When the Cloud Crashes: What Cloudflare’s 2025 Outages Teach Us About Centralization Risk

On December 5, 2025, the internet went dark for millions of users around the world. The cause was not a massive cyberattack, government shutdown, or catastrophic infrastructure failure. Instead, it was a single outage at Cloudflare, one of the largest providers of content delivery, DNS, DDoS protection, and web infrastructure services.

For roughly an hour, an estimated 28% of all global Cloudflare-served HTTP traffic was disrupted. Major websites slowed to a crawl, applications became unreachable, and businesses scrambled to understand what was happening. This event came barely a month after another Cloudflare outage in November, raising essential questions about the fragility of the modern internet and the inherent risks of depending on a handful of dominant infrastructure providers.

These outages were not just embarrassing for Cloudflare. They were a wake-up call for organizations that rely on centralized services for uptime, availability, and security. The events of late 2025 exposed a deeper structural issue in the way the internet is built: centralization has become a single point of failure.

What Happened in November and December 2025?

On December 5, Cloudflare acknowledged a major disruption affecting close to one-third of their total HTTP request volume.

The company later revealed that the incident originated from an internal systems issue related to traffic routing and load balancing. In practical terms: a configuration change triggered a cascading failure. Users experienced:

• Slow loading or timeouts on websites using Cloudflare DNS
• Broken API requests
• Failed logins and authentication services
• Frontend assets (CDN files like JS, CSS, images) failing to load
• DDoS-protected websites becoming temporarily inaccessible

This outage rippled far beyond Cloudflare customers. Because of Cloudflare’s dominance, if one major platform using Cloudflare goes down, its dependents and integrations often break as well.

The November 2025 Outage

The December disruption followed another widespread outage in November caused by an "unrelated" misconfiguration affecting the company’s global network.

Taken together, the two incidents highlight a worrying reality: even the largest, most sophisticated, most security-focused cloud providers remain vulnerable to their own complexity. Modern web infrastructure is so intertwined that a single error can have global consequences.

Why Centralization Magnifies the Impact of Outages

The internet is no longer a decentralized system of many small nodes. Over time, economic incentives, performance demands, and convenience have consolidated vast portions of the web behind a handful of infrastructure giants:

• Cloudflare (CDN, DNS, security)
• Amazon Web Services
• Google Cloud
• Microsoft Azure
• Fastly
• Akamai

These companies deliver performance, security, and reliability that would be difficult for most teams to replicate on their own. But this consolidation introduces an uncomfortable truth: centralization creates systemic risk. Here’s why:

1. A single point of failure affects millions

When one of the world’s largest CDNs goes offline, it’s not just one website that breaks - it’s thousands or millions. This is not simply a problem of downtime; it’s a structural vulnerability that makes the entire internet more fragile.

2. Interconnected services amplify the blast radius

Modern web apps rely on a chain of dependencies. If Cloudflare goes down:

• DNS lookups fail
• Asset delivery stalls
• Authentication services break
• API calls time out
• Entire microservice architectures chain-crash

A failure in one segment can cascade into dozens of downstream failures.

3. Complexity increases the risk of internal errors

Cloudflare operates one of the most complex networks on earth. With thousands of servers, hundreds of data centers, Layer 3–7 security systems, and billions of daily requests, even a tiny internal misconfiguration can produce massive consequences.

The November and December outages were not caused by hackers. They were caused by internal changes, highlighting how modern infrastructure complexity increases the likelihood of accidental outages.

4. The illusion of reliability

Users often perceive major cloud providers as “always available.” But no amount of scale eliminates the possibility of failures. The result is overconfidence: organizations build architectures that assume their provider simply will not go down. The events of 2025 prove otherwise.

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Why This Matters for Developers, Hosting Providers, and Privacy-Focused Users

The Cloudflare outages triggered broader industry conversations about resilience, sovereignty, and how much trust we place in centralized systems. Here are the core lessons:

Lesson 1: Convenience has replaced resilience

Choosing a single cloud provider is easy. Integrating their CDN, DNS, and security tools creates a seamless developer experience. But this convenience often comes at the cost of redundancy.

• Most companies do not implement multi-CDN architectures.
• Most do not maintain secondary DNS providers.
• Most do not run multi-region or multi-cloud deployments.

This is understandable because these solutions are complex, expensive, and require more maintenance. But the tradeoff creates a dangerous dependency: if your provider goes down, so do you.

Lesson 2: Self-hosting is no longer just about privacy - it’s about control

The outages also revived the conversation around self-hosting. Traditionally, self-hosting is framed around:

• Data privacy
• Regulatory compliance
• Avoiding vendor lock-in
• Customization and autonomy

But outages introduced a new argument: self-hosting reduces dependence on centralized infrastructure chokepoints.

For some organizations, running their own DNS, CDN-like edge caching, or reverse proxies, while not trivial, restores control. It does not eliminate risk, but it distributes it differently.

Even privacy-focused communities (e.g., Mastodon, Matrix, and self-hosted CMS platforms) have long warned about depending too heavily on centralized gateways. Cloudflare’s outages gave those warnings new credibility.

Lesson 3: Multi-cloud and decentralized infrastructure are no longer fringe ideas

Historically, multi-cloud architectures were seen as overkill. But recent outages changed perspectives. A number of large platforms began exploring:

• Multi-CDN setups (Cloudflare + Fastly + Akamai)
• Secondary DNS providers
• Geo-distributed hosting across multiple cloud providers
• Edge computing strategies to reduce reliance on one global network
• Decentralized hosting (IPFS, Nostr relays, peer-to-peer distribution)
• Decentralized approaches (once considered niche) are evolving as real alternatives.

Lesson 4: The internet is more fragile than we admit

When nearly one-third of Cloudflare’s traffic stalled, it became clear how dependent the modern internet is on just a few companies.

This is a systemic risk and not just a technical one:

• Economic risk: Outages cost businesses millions
• Political risk: Centralization enables censorship and regulation chokepoints
• Security risk: One breach could have catastrophic consequences
• Resilience risk: A single bug can disable critical infrastructure

The outages exposed an uncomfortable truth: the internet has centralized to a point where reliability is no longer guaranteed. 

Where do we go from here?

Cloudflare’s 2025 outages aren’t a one-time blip, they're a sign of a deeper structural issue with the modern web. To build a more resilient internet, organizations should consider:

1. Diversifying dependencies

• Multi-CDN
• Multi-DNS
• Redundant providers
• fallback APIs
• mirrored infrastructure

2. Evaluating self-hosting where practical

Not every service should be self-hosted but critical components (DNS, auth, static assets, reverse proxies) can sometimes be more reliable when you control them.

3. Adopting decentralized technologies

Peer-to-peer hosting, IPFS, and distributed storage limit the impact of central outages.

4. Implementing true chaos testing

Enterprises often test failures within their own systems but rarely test what happens if their cloud provider fails. The events of 2025 show that they must.

The Cloud isn’t the problem but Centralization is

Cloudflare remains one of the most capable and reliable infrastructure providers in the world. Their response to outages is transparent, and their track record is strong. But that is precisely the point.

If even Cloudflare can suffer back-to-back global outages, no single provider can serve as the foundation for an entire internet.

The 2025 incidents highlight a crucial lesson: the cloud is powerful, but centralization is dangerous. The future of a resilient, privacy-respecting internet lies in distributing risk across providers, across regions, and across architectures.

When the cloud crashes, the solution isn’t abandoning cloud services. It’s redesigning the web to avoid single points of failure.