Cloudflare Outage Is a Reminder of Our Over-Dependence on Small Number of Tech Giants

A major outage at internet infrastructure provider Cloudflare today disrupted access to numerous websites, public services, and AI tools worldwide. The incident follows recent large-scale outages at Amazon Web Services and CrowdStrike, underscoring how much of the modern internet now depends on a small number of private companies. Cloudflare, which routes and secures roughly 20% of all web traffic, attributed the disruption to a spike in unusual traffic but has not identified the cause.

J.B. Branch, Big Tech accountability advocate at Public Citizen, issued the following statement on the outage:

“This outage is another brutal reminder that the internet is far too dependent on a tiny handful of tech giants. For years, industry lobbyists have insisted that deregulation would spark innovation from smaller companies. Instead, we got the opposite: mass consolidation of data, compute, and infrastructure into the hands of a few dominant firms whose failures now cascade across the globe.

“Governments and companies continuing to contract with the same handful of companies are increasing the fragility of both the internet and entire economies. Congress and regulators must finally step in and crack down on anticompetitive behavior, opening markets, requiring interoperability, and ensuring smaller tech firms can compete so the entire digital economy isn’t held hostage by the failures of a few dominant companies.”