Yesterday’s (November 18) Cloudflare outage caused billions of dollars in losses as the internet seemingly came to a standstill. The disruption affected many users trying to access X, Truth Social, Reddit, ChatGPT, Coinbase, Ledger, BitMEX, DefiLlama, and many more.
Ironically, many of the affected platforms and websites were crypto-related, a sector that promotes decentralization. However, a single cloud hosting protocol going down in Cloudflare subsequently brought the internet to a standstill, highlighting just how centralized much of the World Wide Web still is.
The Cloudflare (NET) share price tumbled -1.09% on the day as investors began selling off the stock amid the outage. It is currently trading for $194.76. However, the NET stock is up +80.43% year-to-date, per Yahoo Finance data.
AI-Powered Web Browser Founder Calls Centralization of Platforms Such as Cloudflare a “Systemic Risk”
David Tomasian, Founder and CEO of the AI-powered web browser Curious, highlighted the reliance on a small number of centralized cloud gateways as a systemic risk. He said;
“Today’s Cloudflare outage exposed how dependent we are on a few centralized AI and cloud gateways. This is a systemic risk. The current AI and cloud stack is incredibly fragile, which can lead to disruptions of salaries, transactions, and business operations during an outage like this.
Though we treat AI like a utility, we still deploy it like a monolithic web service. With so much data concentrated in a tiny handful of external servers, a single point of failure can disrupt the entire globe.
The answer is increased decentralization. Personal LLMs running locally remain available regardless of what’s happening on the public internet. They don’t shut down when an external service breaks. They don’t create collateral damage across the economy.
Centralization can’t carry the weight of an AI-driven world. Outages like this will only get more consequential, unless we can increase decentralization.”
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Cloudflare Back Online, But Yesterday’s Outage Highlights Vulnerabilities in the Digital Economy
watching my favorite decentralized censorship-resistant unstoppable crypto web3 app get eviscerated because "cloudflare went down" pic.twitter.com/XUEhUQZuLz
— nader dabit (@dabit3) November 18, 2025
While Cloudflare has since reported everything is back up and running, yesterday’s outage is reported to have cost the global economy multiple billions of dollars, with one report that for every hour Cloudflare was down, $15Bn was being lost.
Whatever the number, it highlights how when a single cloud provider experiences issues, the impact doesn’t stay contained. It becomes an avalanche, hurtling downhill and affecting multiple industries, touching everything from social media platforms to e-commerce checkouts and back-end payment services, with crypto platforms also heavily affected.
While crypto and blockchain platforms have been heavily promoting the decentralization narrative for some time now, many, if not all, appear to be still tied to centralized servers, such as Cloudflare and Amazon Web Services (AWS).
Just last month, in October 2025, an incident involving AWS brought the likes of Coinbase, Robinhood, MetaMask, Venmo, and non-crypto services like Snapchat and Reddit to a grinding halt for multiple hours until the issue was resolved.
Cloudflare Says Outage Was Caused by “Bot Management Feature Issue”
On November 18 Cloudflare experienced a service outage, triggered by an issue with a Bot Management feature, impacting multiple Cloudflare services. Here's a detailed breakdown of what happened. https://t.co/7WArlr5ghI
— Cloudflare (@Cloudflare) November 18, 2025
Internet services provider Cloudflare says a fault in its bot-detection system triggered an outage that took down around 20% of webpages, including several crypto platforms.
Cloudflare said in a post-mortem statement on Tuesday (November 18) that a “feature file” used by its Bot Management System to fight off cyberattacks exceeded its standard limit, resulting in a software failure.
“We are sorry for the impact to our customers and to the Internet in general. Given Cloudflare’s importance in the Internet ecosystem any outage of any of our systems is unacceptable.“
The root cause of the outage was a configuration file that is automatically generated to manage threat traffic. The file grew beyond an expected size of entries and triggered a crash in the software system that handles traffic for a number of Cloudflare’s services.”
The company also said it initially suspected the incident was caused by a hyper-scale Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack, but confirmed there was no cyberattack or malicious activity. Cloudflare handles around 20% of internet traffic and powers around one-third of the top 10,000 websites, apps, and services across the web.
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