Last Tuesday, an outcry from users on the internet due to Zoom, LinkedIn, and Cloudflare not working for millions of accounts, due to a severe fiber cut in a core network path.
Enterprise leaders and experts are now seeing global connectivity infrastructure increasingly brittle, with exposed systemic vulnerabilities in decentralized systems. Internet speed and capacity have indeed soared, but that doesn’t mean resilience has kept pace with that soar.
According to Cloudflare, a change in handling firewall request “caused Cloudflare’s network to be unavailable for several minutes,” confirming the issue was not an attack. But even a brief glitch spread at a speed that exposed the world’s dependence on few digital gatekeepers.
The incident was the second major disruption in less than three weeks, further cementing fears of systemic fragility across the web. As businesses assessed the impact, one concern rose above all: the digital economy has become dangerously centralized.
Concentrated Internet. Fragile Internet.
The outage first appeared as Cloudflare host error, the usual indication of a critical layer of the internet having stalled.
Some organizations, meanwhile, found access suddenly blocked, triggering internal alerts related to Cloudflare blocked events across corporate networks. For companies that rely on automatic filtering and attack controls, even routine safety checks like Distributed Denial of Service, DDoS protection by Cloudflare, struggled under the pressure of the outage, extending the time of downtime.
“Cloudflare’s latest outage is another reminder that much of the internet runs through just a few hands,” Tim Wright technology Partner at Fladgate, says.
He argues that Cloudflare not working proves how scale is no longer a standard for stability. Additionally, companies built around “always-on” expectations, are facing a hard reality that “single points of failure” are everywhere.
Others also reported delays triggered by the Cloudflare block flags within their internal systems, adding more friction to the disruption.
Wright does anticipate some regulatory intervention.
“Repeated disruptions will draw tougher scrutiny from regulators given DORA, NIS2, and the UK’s emerging operational resilience regimes,” he says. Also, authorities will investigate the concentration in cloud and edge services, along with whether convenience has been allowed to outrun control.
Cloudflare Internet Outage Deepening Anxieties
The incident brought up additional concerns for institutions in financial services that are deploying layered controls through zero trust Cloudflare frameworks, heavily reliant on continuous cloud availability.
The outage also reignited concerns about shared dependencies, especially in environments designed around AWS and Cloudflare, where the failure of one frequently imposes unforeseen pressure on the other.
“While the immediate cause may vary, the widespread impact underscores a critical, systemic vulnerability: reliance on outdated or brittle systems that cannot meet modern demand,” according to Co-founder of Silverflow, Robert Kraal.
The failure of Cloudflare API shield, which was used by developers handling high volume interfaces, also amplified delays and slowed transaction flows. Some users attempting to reconnect were met with a Cloudflare challenge, adding extra steps in accessing basic services.
Moreover, automated systems across multiple platforms marked repeated access failures as blocked by Cloudflare protection, adding confusion during the initial moments of the outage. The concentration risk is not limited to a single provider. Systems relying on combined architectures such as Cloudflare and AWS integrations were once again reminded that redundancy is only as strong as the weakest layer.
For Kraal, frames Cloudflare not working as ongoing warnings. Each disruption reflects a “deep-seated systemic technology debt,” with the consequences reaching far beyond downtime.
“When vital services are interrupted, the cost goes well beyond an IT issue; it affects business operations, market confidence, and the fundamental trust users place in the digital ecosystem,” Kraal alerts.
At the peak of the outage, some operations teams triggered internal notices labeled attention required Cloudflare to act on service validation checks, underlining how fast the problem escalated across environments.
The day after, the scale of the Cloudflare internet outage became clear: a single update from one provider had slowed up essential services worldwide.
Kraal warns that unless the core is rebuilt to be flexible, scalable, and real-time, the pattern of Cloudflare not working will continue. And as users around the world refresh screens only to see outage repeated across dashboards, the message is much deeper to ignore.
Without serious investment, issues like this will continue to be a recurring hazard. Or, as Kraal puts it: “outages will remain a costly threat to stability and trust.”
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