When the Internet Pauses, It Teaches Us Something
On 18 Nov, Cloudflare — a company that quietly keeps a huge part of the internet running smoothly — ran into trouble. A small configuration mistake triggered a bug, and suddenly many websites and apps stopped working.
It looked like a disaster. But here’s the thing: events like this are not just failures. They’re warnings, and they help us see problems we usually ignore.
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Why This Matters
Most people assume the internet is solid, stable, and always available. But in reality, a lot of our online world depends on a few big service providers. Cloudflare is one of them.
When one of these giants slips — even slightly — half the digital world can feel the shock.
That’s exactly what happened.
The Wake-Up Call
This outage reminded us of something we forget:
the internet is not unbreakable.
One bug, one wrong file, one faulty update — that’s enough to trigger a chain reaction. It’s the digital version of realizing your house has only one door, and if it jams, you’re stuck inside.
We saw the same problem during the global supply chain issues in 2020. Companies relied on a few major suppliers, and when they failed, everything froze.
The internet now faces the same risk.
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What This Should Teach Us
Here’s what we can learn from the Cloudflare incident:
1. Don’t depend on a single provider
If everything passes through one system and that system breaks, your entire business breaks with it.
2. Build redundancy
Have backups. Backups for backups. Systems should expect failure, not fear it.
3. Offline still matters
Not everything should fall apart when the internet drops. Keep some processes that still work without a live connection.
4. Rethink “always online”
Speed and convenience are great, but reliability is what keeps things alive long-term.
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The Bigger Picture
The internet was originally designed to survive disasters. It could route around failures and keep going. But over time, we’ve centralized everything for convenience.
The result? We’ve traded resilience for speed.
Outages like this push us to think again. They remind us to build stronger systems, spread our risk, and design technology that can bend without breaking.
Conclusion
The Cloudflare outage caused frustration, sure. But it also gave us a valuable lesson:
we rely too much on too few systems.
The good news? Now we know. And knowing is the first step to fixing it.
Resilience may not be glamorous, but when things go wrong, it’s the only thing that saves us.