When Cloudflare went dark, half of the internet staggered with it. People kept calling it an “outage.” Let’s be honest: it was a structural failure baked into how today’s web works.
A centralized DNS stack is incredibly efficient right up to the moment it collapses. And when that single point of failure snaps, nothing downstream matters. Millions of websites freeze because one company sneezes.
We’ve normalized this fragility for way too long.
If yesterday proved anything, it’s this: the modern internet still depends on chokepoints that have no business existing in 2025.
Centralization wasn’t a mistake. It was a shortcut. And shortcuts always invoice us later.
The alternative isn’t theoretical. Decentralized naming systems are finally maturing, and they don’t break just because a single provider does. Not because they’re magical or perfect, but because mathematically they can’t collapse the same way centralized DNS does.
Several experimental architectures have been exploring this direction for years, including ledger-based distributed name systems that remove the root-layer bottleneck entirely. The point is: the path forward exists — we just haven’t committed to it as an internet community.
Yesterday wasn’t a warning. It was a preview.
The next outage won’t be a wake-up call. It’ll be a consequence.
It’s time to rethink the root layer of the internet, not patch it.
Resilient systems aren’t optional anymore. They’re overdue.
Not really. I’m calling it what it actually was: a single-point-of-failure event that exposed how dependent the modern web is on one company’s infrastructure.
Whether we call it an “outage,” “incident,” or “hiccup” doesn’t change the fact that thousands of unrelated services broke simply because one upstream provider had a bad moment.
If a small naming disruption can cascade through half the internet, the terminology isn’t the issue. The architecture is.
Just kinda stupid to call out DNS, when that’s the part that didn’t fault.
The point isn’t that Cloudflare’s DNS literally failed. The point is that a disruption in one layer of Cloudflare’s stack was enough to break a huge chunk of the web.
That’s exactly the problem.
When a single company’s infrastructure is woven so deeply into routing, protection, CDN, DNS, and edge services, even a non-DNS fault can create DNS-level consequences downstream.
If the internet behaves as if Cloudflare is the DNS for half the web, then the architecture—not the specific failing module—is the issue.
Everyone gets that argument. It’s not novel.
My point is that, when trying to communicate that point of view, it’s stupid to focus in the post on cloudflare’s DNS, as that’s the part that worked fine. Especially since you had the perfect example right there.
The post wasn’t “about DNS” as a protocol. It was about the fact that Cloudflare sits in front of so much of the internet that even issues near the DNS layer create DNS-visible symptoms across thousands of services.
That’s why the example works.
When a single provider is so deeply embedded that people instinctively check their DNS first and entire regions of the web become unreachable, that’s not a messaging error. It’s the whole point.
If the distinction between “the DNS module worked” and “the internet behaved as if Cloudflare’s DNS was down” becomes the hill to die on, that says more about the fragility of the architecture than about the wording of the post.
The internet didn’t behave as if cloudflare’s DNS was down? That’s a shitty analogy you came up with. Everyone else knew it was cloudflare’s proxying that was the issue.
You’re somehow weirdly attached to this shitty analogy, to the point that it destroys your, otherwise decent, messaging. Why are you making this into a hill to die on?
This is ridiculous.
You’re over-focusing on the analogy. It’s just one sentence meant to illustrate the difference between two Cloudflare services for people who don’t follow the technical details closely. If you got the point already, great. Others didn’t, and that’s who the analogy was for. No need to turn it into a whole crusade.