Cloudflare broke the internet. The Internet Needs a Decentralized Backbone
So the internet broke again yesterday.
Cloudflare , the company that sits in front of millions of websites caused error pages to ripple across the internet. Popular services including ChatGPT, X, major retailers and government sites(Not related to Kenya’s cyber attack), briefly failed to load, and the outage lasted several hours while Cloudflare rolled out fixes and monitored recovery.
Accidents happen. But again, in a different way this time, its a reminder that modern internet infrastructure is far more centralized, intertwined, and fragile than most people realize.
What Cloudflare Actually Does for the Internet
The average person has never heard of Cloudflare . But to anyone building on the web, it is unavoidable.
Cloudflare accelerates websites by caching assets in hundreds of global locations. It shields servers from DDoS attacks. It handles DNS lookups, routes traffic, filters bots, terminates SSL, and runs small snippets of code on the edge through Cloudflare Workers. For many startups, it serves as their security team, traffic manager, and global distribution system all in one.
It’s convenient. It’s cheap. It works. That combination quietly turned Cloudflare into one of the most influential companies on the internet. At one point, its stocks were going crazy, but this is a story for another day.
Convenience has a cost.
Why the Outage Was a big Deal
This wasn’t a targeted attack or a catastrophic network collapse. It was, according to Cloudflare’s own postmortem, a cascading failure triggered by an unexpected configuration and permissions issue inside a central metadata service.
A small internal fault became a global event simply because Cloudflare occupies such a massive surface area.
When one company fronts a large share of the internet, that company becomes a pressure point. And pressure points fail.
A Centralized Internet Pretending to Be Decentralized
The outage tells us something uncomfortable: the internet is no longer the distributed network we imagine it to be. It is a mesh of centralized chokepoints held together by a few vendors.
Cloudflare is one. AWS is another. Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, Fastly, Akamai, Meta’s backbone, Submarine cable consortia. Each layer has its own dependencies. Each dependency has its own blind spots. When one slips, millions feel it.
The philosophical flaw is simple: we have a global communication system built on a handful of corporate single points of failure. It works beautifully on normal days, and then one glitch reminds us how brittle it all really is.
Could Decentralized Systems Have Softened the Impact?
Yes, but not in the magical “blockchain fixes everything” sense. Decentralization works when it removes bottlenecks and spreads responsibilities across many independent nodes.
A decentralized alternative would look very different:
1. Content stored across IPFS/Arweave/Filecoin nodes, not concentrated in a single CDN.
2. DNS resolved through distributed systems like Handshake or ENS, instead of one company’s name servers.
3. Compute executed in permissionless environments such as the Internet Computer (ICP) or Akash, not a single corporate edge.
4. Availability guaranteed by incentives and cryptographic proofs, rather than trust in a vendor’s uptime record.
The idea is not to replace Cloudflare overnight. The idea is to break the monopoly of responsibility. If one node, cluster, or provider fails, the rest of the network keeps serving traffic.
How a Decentralized Cloudflare Could Work in Practice
Let’s make it concrete.
Imagine a service built on the following architecture:
1. Content Layer
Assets live on IPFS or Arweave. Filecoin or Storj handle persistence. Nodes compete to serve content quickly, and get rewarded for low latency and high availability.
2. Routing Layer
A lightweight smart contract tracks which nodes hold what content. Clients automatically discover nearby nodes through a distributed routing protocol. No single authority decides what goes where.
3. Compute Layer
Dynamic requests get processed by a decentralized compute network. ICP canisters or Akash containers handle server-side logic. Execution results are verified and cached by edge nodes.
4. Security Layer
Rate limiting happens at many edges simultaneously. Attack traffic gets absorbed, not funneled toward one company’s firewall. Nodes stake tokens and lose them if they behave maliciously.
5. Identity Layer
Domains resolve through ENS or Handshake. Records point to content hashes or canister IDs, not a vendor-controlled DNS server.
6. Fallback Layer
To keep things realistic, traditional CDN nodes participate as well. They simply become optional, not mandatory.
In this model, no outage at any single provider can take the world down with it.
In Conclusion
Cloudflare isn’t going anywhere. It’s too good at what it does, and the internet depends on it. But developers and infrastructure architects have decisions to make. The outage was a reminder to diversify, replicate, and design for failure.
If you want to stay up in times like these:
1. Don’t let one vendor become your only gateway to users.
2. Keep critical assets mirrored on decentralized networks.
3. Use DNS providers that support multi-provider failover.
4. Explore edge compute that isn’t tied to one company’s platform.
5. Treat decentralization not as ideology, but as insurance.
The web doesn’t have to be fragile. We simply designed it that way because it was easier. The next outage shouldn’t take your company down. If it does, we’ll know the lesson didn’t stick. And I’ll find you.
Thanks for reading!
