According to The Verge, Cloudflare co-founder and CEO Matthew Prince detailed in a Tuesday night blog post that the company’s “worst outage since 2019” was caused by a problem in its Bot Management system. The system, which controls which automated crawlers can scan websites using Cloudflare’s CDN, failed spectacularly and took down major services including ChatGPT, X, and even outage tracker Downdetector for several hours. Cloudflare had previously revealed that about 20 percent of the web runs through its network, which is designed to handle traffic spikes and DDoS attacks. The Tuesday crash disconnected many of these sites, resembling recent outages from Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services.
When the internet’s backbone breaks
Here’s the thing about modern internet infrastructure – we don’t really notice it until it fails. And when Cloudflare goes down, it’s like the internet’s immune system suddenly stops working. The company that’s supposed to protect sites from bad traffic accidentally blocked legitimate users instead. Basically, their bot management system went haywire and started treating everyone like a potential threat.
Think about the ripple effects here. ChatGPT users couldn’t access their AI assistant, developers building on Cloudflare’s platform saw their applications go dark, and enterprises relying on their CDN watched their websites become unreachable. It’s a stark reminder of how concentrated our internet infrastructure has become. When one key player stumbles, everything from social media to productivity tools can tumble like dominoes.
The consolidation problem
So we’ve got Microsoft Azure having issues, AWS going down occasionally, and now Cloudflare – which was just named a Fortune Future 50 company – experiencing its worst outage in five years. What does this tell us about the state of internet infrastructure? We’re putting a lot of eggs in very few baskets.
The timing is particularly interesting. Cloudflare’s been growing rapidly and positioning itself as the future of internet security and performance. But when your bot management system – the very thing designed to distinguish good traffic from bad – becomes the problem, it raises questions about complexity. Are these systems becoming too smart for their own good?
Ultimately, Tuesday’s outage serves as a wake-up call about internet resilience. When 20% of the web can go dark because one company’s specialized system fails, maybe we need to rethink how distributed our “distributed” infrastructure really is.
