The Great Centralisation: History of the internet is a tragedy in Four acts

The Great Centralisation: History of the internet is a tragedy in Four acts

Cloudflare’s 2025 WAF update triggered a global outage, blocking 28% of HTTP traffic and crippling services like Zoom, LinkedIn, and Coinbase. The failure stemmed from a logic error in a routine code patch, revealing the internet’s reliance on centralized infrastructure.

Why This Matters

The internet was designed as a decentralized mesh network to survive nuclear attacks, but modern systems depend on centralized cloud providers and proxy services. A single misconfigured update or regional outage can now disrupt 30% of global traffic, costing billions in downtime and eroding the original ethos of resilience. The technical reality is a stark contrast to the ideal of a self-healing, distributed network.

Key Insights

• “28% HTTP traffic outage, 2025 (Cloudflare)”
• “AWS us-east-1 collapse impacting 113 services, 2025”
• “Web3 apps reliant on centralized RPC providers like Infura”

Practical Applications

• Use Case: Cloudflare’s proxy managing 28% of HTTP traffic
• Pitfall: Over-reliance on centralized cloud providers leading to systemic outages

References:

• https://dev.to/rengas/the-great-centralisation-history-of-the-internet-is-a-tragedy-in-four-acts-30k5