Cloudflare Outage Illustrates Hidden Threats to the Web

On Tuesday, internet service provider Cloudflare suffered a major global outage that impacted numerous websites and services across the web including Twitter/X, ChatGPT, among many others. When it went down, it took down a huge chunk of the internet with it and many had never even heard of it.

For the uninitiated, Cloudflare is a service (referred to as a content delivery network or CDN) that filters internet traffic for websites, apps and related services. Essentially, before you can reach a website that uses the service, you have to go through Cloudflare, which assesses your risk before letting you pass. More importantly, it helps to squelch huge bursts of traffic — sometimes thousands of requests per minute — from clogging up a server and slowing or even shutting down the website.

This isn’t a new or particularly unique service, but Cloudflare is the largest provider of its type, servicing roughly 20 percent of the internet. Ironically, the very thing it is there to protect — huge surges in internet traffic — may have been what caused it to go offline.

For those who work in the world of the internet, Cloudflare and other CDNs are standard business practice. They are particularly helpful for websites with loads of traffic and others that may be subject to threats. This is critical for services that need to operate during times of crisis — think weather services during a hurricane. In a disaster, they can be burdened by thousands and thousands of visitors on server technology that can handle day-to-day traffic, but not the weight of that.

The problem is there are lots of these kinds of services that exist in the shadows of the internet propping up websites and apps. Most people don’t know they are using them every day, but they form the critical infrastructure of the internet and we often take them for granted.

Even more concerning, these companies have been consolidating over the past decade. Larger corporations like Google, Microsoft and others gobble up smaller organizations and integrate them into larger service models. The end result is a lot of concentrated power controlling one of the most important resources in the world.

Unfortunately, there is little we can do about it. The federal government and others around the world seem uninterested in doing the tough work of regulating technology that is often evolving faster than we can keep up with. They can demand stricter privacy and more transparency, but by the time they have figured out how to deal with one threat, 100 more have taken its place.

We all worry about cybersecurity, and rightfully so, but we probably think very little of cyber infrastructure. But just like your home, when you see cracks in the facade, it’s time to call a foundation guy…just in case. The more we know, the better we can weather the inevitable storms that are coming.

Cloudflare is just another in a long line of service providers with outages that impact millions of people. We might want to understand what they do…just in case.

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