Flashspoter - Cloudflare is back in the spotlight after a technical glitch on Tuesday (18/11) rocked most internet services in various countries. Although the recovery took place in a matter of hours, this incident once again confirms one big problem that is rarely talked about publicly: the digital world is too dependent on a few giant infrastructure companies.
Unlike other reports that focus on lists of fallen platforms or minute-by-minute chronologies, this time's viewpoint highlights how the Cloudflare incident demonstrates the fragility of the foundations of the modern internet, a global network that can apparently falter just because one “bloated” configuration file is too large.
Cloudflare, the company that processes traffic for about 20% of the global web, confirmed that the problem started around 05: 20 AM ET when their threat detection system noticed an unusual spike in traffic. The main cause turned out to be not a cyberattack, but an automatic configuration file that grew beyond normal limits. The File then triggered a crash in the core software that governs the traffic distribution of some of their services.
The disruption has made large sites and applications such as Shopify, Spotify, Indeed, X (Twitter), to NJ Transit's digital services experience problems. Even OpenAI's ChatGPT and Sora's Short-Form video app suffered a glitch due to a dependency on a third, party service-which turned out to be Cloudflare.
Around 09: 30 ET, most services began to recover. Cloudflare then stated at 12: 45 that the entire system was “operating normally”. For cybersecurity and internet infrastructure experts, however, this incident leaves deeper questions.
Alan Woodward, Professor of cybersecurity at the University of Surrey, said it was “astonishing” that Cloudflare's network design was supposed to prevent a single point of failure. He asserted that Cloudflare's position as the” gateway “and” shield " of many large platforms makes its impact very broad when disruptions occur.
A similar comment came from Lee Skillen, Cloudsmith'S CTO. According to him, a highly connected modern infrastructure making one small mistake could trigger a domino effect. With its ever-growing scale, he calls the probability of a major disruption like this “increasingly inevitable”.
On the internal side, Cloudflare shows an open attitude. Their CTO, Dane Knecht, directly stated that the company “failed” to meet customer trust. He explained that a latent bug in the bot mitigation system was the main trigger before it developed into a global-scale network problem. Knecht insisted that the incident was “unacceptable” and promised to improve all aspects that are prone to recurrence.
But beyond that transparency, the incident adds to a long list of major infrastructure disruptions in recent months. AWS experienced a major outage a month ago, followed by Azure from Microsoft. Not to mention the CrowdStrike case in 2024 which triggered global chaos to make airlines and hospitals temporarily paralyzed.
The frequency of these disruptions signals an alarming pattern: the world's internet service now rests on few providers, making systemic, albeit unintentional, risks even higher. With Cloudflare handling trillions of requests every day, a single technical glitch is enough to make parts of the internet “Dark”.
Users may perceive the Cloudflare issue as a temporary inconvenience when the app is not loading. However, a short blackout such as this could still lead to the loss of money, reputation, and even the company's operations for the tech companies that are behind the trading platforms, the transportation services, and so forth.
While Cloudflare has restored all services and is investigating the root of the problem in more depth, this incident is an important reminder: the internet looks like a giant system that is unlikely to collapse, but in reality it relies heavily on several key players. As long as the concentration of infrastructure forces remains as it is today, similar disruptions are not only possible, they are almost certain to be repeated.
Source NYTimes, CNBC, The Independent
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