The Cloudflare outage wasn’t the issue. Our digital dependencies were.

So, after the world and their mothers spent a solid 8 hours ranting online about how “catastrophic” the Cloudflare outage was yesterday, I thought… Right. Time to actually unpack the point here that folk are missing.

Because what happened this week wasn’t a failure of Cloudflare. It wasn’t “bad engineering”. And it definitely wasn’t the apocalypse, no matter how dramatic some of the commentary tried to be.

No - the outage wasn’t the story.

The real story was what it revealed.
About the internet we’ve quietly built.
About the consolidation we’ve normalised.
And about the very fragile foundations we’re balancing and building our digital lives on.

Cloudflare didn’t break the internet.
Cloudflare simply reminded us how terrifyingly easy it is for the internet to break.
And if that line doesn’t make you flinch, just hear me out for five more minutes.

The Day the Internet Had a Little Wobble

Let’s start by calling this what it really was: a global wobble.
Not quite a meltdown.
Not quite a disaster movie (but I oh so do love a good disaster movie!)

It was just the universe tapping us on the shoulder, whispering:

“Hey lads… maybe routing half the modern world through one traffic light probably isnt the smartest idea.”

While the memes were flying and everyone suddenly transformed into part-time network engineers and piled on the blame game, the human impact was unfolding in real time:

• Commuters in Jersey stranded because the ticketing system decided to take a sickie.
• McDonald’s kiosks worldwide were frozen on Cloudflare error screens - possibly the only time in history where “the machine is broken” wasn’t an excuse.
• Contactless payments failing across the high streets - awkward looks, awkward queues, awkward everything.
• Airline booking and check-in systems timing out mid-transaction (yes, that was me!)
• Government portals, including regulators and public services, going offline.
• E-commerce grinding to a halt, baskets abandoned not by choice but by timeout.

Millions of people were impacted - and the majority had no idea why. Like come on, how many people even know what Cloudflare did up to yesterday?

Which is precisely why this matters.

Cloudflare Didn’t Fail. Our Dependency Model Did.

Here’s the thing: Cloudflare handled this with transparency and speed.
They deployed a config change, something unexpected broke, and they rolled back quickly.
Fair play to them, and I mean that sincerely - I've been in those chaotic moments with managers on your back screaming and you're trying to keep composure to identify the problem and fix it.

They got it back up in 3 hours - bravo.

But us all focusing on Cloudflare is missing the plot entirely.

The real issue is this:

We’ve built a digital economy where a single chokepoint can stall everything from your lunch order to your flight home.

Cloudflare now sits in front of around 20% of global web properties.

Not big, flashy websites - everything:

• Payment flows
• Airline APIs
• Hotel booking engines
• Retail POS backends
• Government services
• Transport apps
• Healthcare portals
• E-commerce
• SaaS
• Media
• And yes, even your favourite doomscrolling platforms

Oh... and the irony that the very websites to identify internet outages were also down wasnt lost on me ;)

If tomorrow Cloudflare went offline for a full business day, the global economy would feel it - genuinely, materially - before lunchtime.

We didn’t design an “internet”. We just designed a reinforced digital funnel and put everyone through it.

Efficient? Yes.
Secure? Hmmm.. yes, usually.
Resilient? Ha! Not even close.

**We Used to Have a Web.

Now We Have a Monoculture.**

The original promise of the internet was diversity.

Lots of nodes.
Lots of paths.
No single point of failure.

Somewhere along the way, we swapped that architecture for something more… hmmm... let's just say, convenient:

• A few cloud providers running almost all global compute.
• A few CDNs routing almost all traffic.
• A few payments providers verifying almost all cards.
• A few identity providers authenticating almost all users.
• A few software supply chains feeding almost all code.
• A few platforms hosting almost all content.

It’s like replacing a thriving ecosystem with a single crop and then acting shocked when pests appear to destroy it.

Yes, monocultures are wonderfully efficient - right up until the very moment they aren’t.

Swiss Re Were Practically Waving a Red Flag

This isn’t just me ranting into the void.

Swiss Re - the global reinsurance giant whose entire job is modelling world-ending risks - literally warned us about this 12 months ago!

Their SONAR report puts “Big Tech dependency” in the same conversation as:

• Geopolitical shocks
• Cyber catastrophes
• Supply chain collapse
• Natural disaster cascades

Why?
Because if one of a handful of tech providers suffers a major incident, the economic fallout is no longer “IT downtime”.

It’s systemic.

Transport stops.
Payments stop.
Trading stops.
Public services stop.
Healthcare slows.
Critical infrastructure stalls.

This Cloudflare wobble was the mildest possible version of that scenario.

And still it touched transport, retail, government, food, payments, and aviation.

Imagine for a sec if it lasted 12 hours.

Actually… let’s do exactly that!

The 12-Hour Scenario We Pretend Isn’t Possible

(I kinda like this already....)

So, even if we extend this outage to half a day, suddenly we’re dealing with:

• Airports stuck in chaos
• Retailers unable to take payment
• Supply chains freezing mid-shipment
• Government communications collapsing
• Hospitals juggling manual intake
• Online trading thrown into turmoil
• Small businesses losing an entire day’s revenue

We live in a world where cashless is the future, until the internet sneezes - then it’s suddenly 1992 again. (Oh actually hang on... you're right... I was only warned about this a few weeks back)

The uncomfortable truth?
We didn’t reduce fragility when we centralised everything.

We relocated it.

And we placed it behind the login page of a vendor dashboard most executives have never ever even seen.

Convenience Sold, Control Surrendered

Every step that brought us here made sense individually:

• “Let’s move to cloud — it’s cheaper.”
• “Let’s use a CDN — it’s faster.”
• “Let’s adopt managed security — it’s easier.”
• “Let’s use their identity service — fewer passwords.”

But decisions that are harmless in isolation become dangerous in combination.

Bit by bit, we outsourced control.
And bit by bit, we lost visibility.

We stopped owning the infrastructure we depend on, and we replaced ownership with trust - and here's the kicker.... we never even for one second paused to ask if the trust was earned!

**Resilience Isn’t a Product.

It certainly doesn't show as a line item on a software renewal invoice. It’s a Design Philosophy.**

If there’s one message I want leaders to take from this week, it’s this:

You cannot buy resilience. You have to architect it.

What does that look like? Well... very good question, it looks like this:

• Know your dependency map
• Assume your intermediaries will fail
• Avoid monoculture where it matters
• Keep alternative paths, providers, fallbacks
• Don’t let vendors dictate forced migration or dependency
• Break the lock-in wherever you can
• Own the critical layers of your stack
• Build for graceful degradation, not blind faith

This is digital sovereignty in the real world.

Not a slogan - a necessity.

The Illusion of Control Failed — Not the Internet

Cloudflare will fix their systems.
AWS will fix theirs.
Microsoft will fix theirs.

They always do.

The question is not whether they’re competent. 100% They are.

The real question is:

Do we really want the global economy to hinge on the assumption that they will never have a bad day?

You see this outage wasn’t an anomaly.
It was a case study.
A preview.
Call it a nudge even.

A reminder that:

• Complexity without diversity becomes fragility.
• Convenience without autonomy becomes exposure.
• Dependency without insight becomes risk.
• And trust without control becomes illusion.

The internet didn’t fail. Our understanding of it did.

And the sooner we stop turning a blind eye to that and confront it, the safer the future becomes.