Cloudflare and AWS Outages Reveal the Internet’s Hidden Fragility

Recent outages at Cloudflare and Amazon Web Services (AWS) have exposed a harsh reality: the global internet is massive in scale yet fragile at its core. The disruptions revealed how deeply the modern world relies on a small group of infrastructure giants firms that often operate in the background yet hold the web’s essential foundations together.

A System Held Up by a Few Providers-

The failures highlighted the Internet’s growing centralization problem. Today, AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud control nearly two-thirds of the cloud market, while Cloudflare powers and protects roughly 20% of global web traffic. When any one of these companies suffers a disruption whether in an AWS US-EAST-1 region or Cloudflare’s global edge network the impact is immediate and global.

AWS’s DNS issues last month triggered 17 million user reports and affected more than 3,500 companies in over 60 countries, disrupting services like Snapchat, Roblox, and Amazon’s own marketplace. Cloudflare’s more recent outage caused by a mis-sized configuration file that crashed its traffic management system disabled ChatGPT, X, Spotify, Shopify, and more for nearly three hours. Another Cloudflare incident on June 12, 2025 lasted two hours and twenty-eight minutes due to a failure linked to Workers KV storage and a third-party service. These were not cyberattacks but internal errors yet the fallout was global.

Cybersecurity expert Professor Alan Woodward summarized the issue: the outages show how “very important Internet-based services are reliant on a relatively few major players,” making their failures inevitably widespread.

Outages Produce Real Financial Damage

For payment processors and merchants, outages create chaos instantly. Monica Eaton, CEO of Chargebacks911 / Fi911, warns that the world underestimates how messy the aftermath can be.

Customers retry purchases, cards are charged twice, confirmation pages freeze, and confusion turns into disputes. This leads to unintended duplicate payments and chargebacks weeks later.

Eaton advises companies to treat outages as routine operational risks:

• Track failed and duplicate transactions

• Communicate with customers immediately

• Document the incident as it happens

“None of this is about panic,” she says. “It’s about owning the risks you can control.” With the internet dependent on a few key providers, she adds: “Cloudflare had an outage today. Another provider will have one tomorrow.”

Any Weak Link Can Break Payments-

Payments systems are uniquely vulnerable. Fadl Mantash, CISO of Tribe Payments, notes that even unrelated upstream failures can cascade across industries.

A single card transaction relies on cloud platforms, authentication tools, APIs, processors, and card networks. When any component breaks, the entire chain can collapse.

Mantash argues for a “prepper mindset”: systems must be modular, failure scenarios rehearsed, and teams equipped to act immediately. True resilience requires treating confidentiality, integrity, and availability as core principles, not optional goals.

What Comes Next for the Internet?

The outages of 2025 are reshaping how governments and companies build the Internet’s future.

1. Redundancy Becomes Mandatory

Organizations are adopting multi-cloud strategies to avoid relying on a single provider. Governments, including the UK, are developing national outage-response plans after Cloudflare-related disruptions hit retailers and Visa.

2. Better Architecture, Not Bigger Servers

Many failures originate from weak application-level redundancy. Even the biggest cloud providers cannot make up for bad design.

3. Rise of the Decentralized Web

Outages are accelerating interest in Web3 alternatives: decentralized CDNs, IPFS storage, Filecoin networks, and decentralized compute platforms such as Akash Network all built to eliminate single points of failure.

The Road Ahead-

Major cloud providers will remain central to the internet, but blind dependence is ending. The next phase of the web will be more distributed, modular, and resilient. The outages of 2025 were not warnings they were blueprints for what the future internet must become.