Today I’m breaking down the Cloudflare outage that briefly knocked chunks of the internet sideways, and why incidents like this barely making the news should worry all of us.
Cloudflare sits in front of millions of websites as DNS, DDoS protection, and a web firewall. When they wobble, the ripple hits apps and services you use every day. This week’s outage was traced back to an internal Bot Management failure where a routine permissions change caused duplicate data, a config file ballooned in size, hit a hard limit, and triggered a cascade of 500 errors across the web.
But the bigger story is not just what happened. It’s how we react to it.
A breach or outage used to be front page news. Now it’s background noise. That desensitisation is dangerous, especially at a time when state sponsored cyber activity is increasing and modern cyber conflict is often about pressure, disruption, and erosion of trust rather than one big Hollywood moment.
I also run through the other pressure points that keep the internet standing, and what happens if they are attacked or fail. DNS providers, hyperscale cloud regions, identity platforms, payment rails, internet exchange points, BGP routing, undersea cables, mobile core networks, and CDNs like Cloudflare. These are the chokepoints that make our digital lives fast, but also fragile.
If we shrug off constant digital disruption as normal, we make life easier for the people who want to exploit it.