Major internet disruptions are becoming increasingly common, with outages at cloud service providers like Cloudflare, Microsoft Azure, and Amazon Web Services (AWS) taking down widespread services in recent months. This isn’t necessarily because of more failures, but rather, a more concentrated and vulnerable internet infrastructure.
The Centralization Problem
The core issue is that a small number of companies — primarily Cloudflare, AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud Platform (GCP) — now underpin a massive portion of the web. When one of these providers experiences an outage, it doesn’t just affect their own services; it cascades through countless websites and platforms that rely on them.
Cloudflare, for example, is a dominant Content Delivery Network (CDN). CDNs manage web traffic, protect against attacks, and accelerate content delivery. As Angelique Medina, Head of Internet Intelligence at Cisco ThousandEyes, explains, they function as the “front door” to many websites. When that door shuts, users lose access.
This consolidation makes the internet more efficient under normal conditions, but also creates single points of failure. As Ramutė Varnelytė, CEO of IPXO, notes, these outages expose how dependent the digital economy is on just a few infrastructure providers.
The Numbers Don’t Lie: Disruptions Aren’t Rising, Their Impact Is
Interestingly, Cisco ThousandEyes data actually shows that the frequency of service outages hasn’t increased. What has changed is the scale of disruption. Because so many more websites and applications rely on these centralized services, each outage affects a larger and larger portion of the internet.
In the past, companies often hosted their own servers or used a wider range of providers. Today, small and large businesses alike are increasingly dependent on AWS, Azure, GCP, and Cloudflare. This concentration means that even isolated incidents can trigger widespread outages.
Recent Examples
The pattern is clear:
– November 2025: Cloudflare outage took down OpenAI, Spotify, X, and Canva.
– Earlier in 2025: A Microsoft Azure outage downed Xbox and Minecraft.
– October 2025: AWS issues brought down Amazon, Reddit, and Snapchat.
– June 2025: Outages at Google Cloud Platform and Cloudflare impacted numerous platforms.
These disruptions are not isolated incidents; they are symptoms of a fundamental shift in how the internet is structured.
In conclusion: While the internet isn’t necessarily crashing more often, the consequences of each outage are growing because of extreme centralization. The future of web reliability depends on addressing this dependency and diversifying infrastructure to avoid catastrophic failures.
