When the Web Collapses

What happens when a few companies have a stranglehold on the internet

Here we go again. Another massive internet outage.

This time, Cloudflare—one of the biggest networks on Earth—fell over. And when it did, the ripple took out huge chunks of the web. Sites, apps, services, everything. For hundreds of millions of people, the internet simply… stopped.

And once again, we’re reminded of something we keep pretending isn’t true: we’ve handed the keys to the internet to a tiny group of companies. When one of them stumbles, everything downstream goes dark.

The last time this happened was just last month, when AWS—Amazon Web Services—collapsed under a DNS failure. That outage lasted more than fifteen hours and broke everything from banking apps to smart home devices. Amazon later admitted a bug wiped out a key DNS entry for its database service. One bad process. One tiny automated change. And suddenly, half the internet was face-down in the dirt.

Cloudflare’s crash wasn’t quite as long, but the impact was just as wide. ChatGPT, X, Spotify, Canva, OpenAI… even AWS… all hit. And that’s just the big names. Thousands of smaller sites rely on Cloudflare for DNS, security, traffic routing, or just staying online without being hit by constant attacks. When Cloudflare stopped responding, they all fell in line right behind it.

This is the quiet part people don’t say out loud: the internet looks big, but it isn’t. It runs on a few critical arteries. Cloudflare. AWS. Google Cloud. Azure. When one of them sneezes, the whole system catches pneumonia.

Now imagine if the disaster wasn’t an accident. Imagine if someone did this on purpose.

If cybercriminals, or a hostile foreign operator, managed to hit one of these providers—DNS, routing, identity, control planes—the impact wouldn’t be a glitch or a slowdown. It would be global paralysis.

Banks offline. Hospitals cut off. Airlines frozen. Phones and apps failing all at once. Emergency systems suddenly unreachable. A digital blackout.

And it wouldn’t take bombs or armies. Just a well-timed exploit in a place where we’ve put too much trust.

A writer friend of mine once concocted a way for terrorists to bring the entire city of Los Angeles to a standstill with just three sticks of dynamite placed at vital freeway interchanges during rush hour traffic.

This is that. But a lot worse.

We’ve built a civilization on top of a Jenga tower. We keep pulling pieces out, piling on more weight, and hoping the whole thing doesn’t fall on a Tuesday afternoon because of a bad software update.

Here’s the part that worries me: the companies running the backbone of the internet are incredibly good at what they do. That’s why they dominate. But even the smartest engineers can’t save a system that’s designed to fail big. Redundancy doesn’t help if your redundancy depends on the same small set of companies.

There’s no simple fix. But there are better ways to build this. Spread the risk out. Use multiple providers. Avoid putting everything through one choke point. And governments—who rely on these same private networks—need to rethink what “critical infrastructure” actually means in a world where Cloudflare having hiccups can break half the country’s apps for hours.

These outages aren’t just annoyances. They’re warnings. And we can’t keep brushing them off. The internet is now the power grid of modern life. When it fails, everything else goes with it.

If the next outage isn’t an accident, we won’t get twelve hours to shrug it off.

We’ll get a crisis.