UPDATE: The Internet Crashed Because Of Another Boo-boo
Yet again, a simple error took websites and apps down all over the world
Cloudflare went down this week. And once again, a huge part of the internet fell over because of a simple mistake. Not a hacker. Not a cyber-attack. A basic, preventable error inside one of the biggest companies holding up the web.
Cloudflare says a permissions change in one of their systems caused a file to suddenly double in size. That pushed things past a limit, and the whole traffic-routing layer choked. One file. One change. And millions of people lost access to websites and apps.
Another boo-boo. Another major outage.
We’ve seen this pattern before
A big provider slips up, and half the internet goes down. It keeps happening.
Amazon Web Services once broke a massive chunk of the web because someone mistyped a command and took down more servers than planned. One typo.
Years ago, a single routing mistake — the AS7007 incident — caused global internet chaos.
Quarter after quarter, we get cable cuts, broken updates, botched settings, buggy security patches. Always the same story: simple errors with massive impact.
Why this keeps happening
The problem is concentration. A small number of companies carry a huge amount of the internet on their backs. Cloudflare. Amazon. Google. Akamai. A few others.
These systems are insanely complex. A small change can cascade into a global outage. And because so many websites and apps rely on the same companies, there’s no backup when something breaks.
This is where it gets dangerous
This week’s outage was an accident. But what if someone did this on purpose?
If a simple mistake can knock out big parts of the web, imagine what a coordinated attack could do. Not theory — reality.
Bad actors could hit these chokepoints and take down:
A country’s banking system
Emergency services
Airports and air-traffic systems
Power grids
Hospitals
Supply chains
Take out one provider at the right moment, and you can cripple an entire nation.
We need to stop pretending the web is invincible
We need more redundancy. More diversity in providers. More transparency. And a serious look at how much of the world depends on a tiny number of companies that keep proving they can break the internet with a small mistake.
This Cloudflare incident is another warning shot. Another reminder that the backbone of modern life is held together by very few hands — and those hands make mistakes.
When the web collapses, it’s not always because someone attacked us. Sometimes it’s just because somebody clicked the wrong thing.
And that should scare us a lot more than it does.