A staggering outage at Cloudflare on November 18, 2025 knocked giant services like X, ChatGPT and Spotify offline and exposed the illusion of an internet that’s reliable by design rather than by luck. Millions of users found themselves staring at error messages while entire businesses, creators, and everyday citizens lost access to tools they take for granted. This wasn’t a dramatic cyberattack; it was a routine internal failure that cascaded across a system built on concentration, not resilience.
Cloudflare’s own updates show the disruption began in the early U.S. morning hours and was traced to an automatically generated configuration that grew beyond expected size and crashed traffic-handling software, with a fix deployed within a few hours. The company emphasized there was no evidence of a malicious intrusion, which is cold comfort when a software glitch can darken whole swaths of the web. When one company manages a massive chunk of global traffic, a single error becomes a national-level outage.
Only weeks earlier, Amazon Web Services suffered a massive DNS and load-balancer failure out of its US-EAST-1 region that disrupted apps and services across finance, healthcare, and commerce on October 20, 2025. The AWS incident showed the exact same structural fragility: a deep dependency on a handful of cloud behemoths whose failures ripple through the economy. When hospitals, payment systems, and flight kiosks can be affected by a single cloud region’s misconfiguration, this is not “growing pains” — it is a systemic threat.
Technology experts warned then and they warned again after Cloudflare that these incidents are harbingers, not anomalies — a deliberate attack could do far worse than accidental outages. Conservatives should be blunt: centralization of critical infrastructure hands enormous leverage to private companies and, by extension, whoever controls — or compromises — them. That concentration of power flies in the face of conservative principles of decentralization, competition, and secure national sovereignty.
This moment calls for accountability and commonsense fixes, not empty platitudes from corporate press releases. Lawmakers must demand transparent post-mortems, enforce meaningful diversification of infrastructure, and make resilience a condition of doing business for companies that operate like public utilities. At the same time, conservatism’s respect for free enterprise means we should push for more competition and less crony consolidation, not a heavier hand that simply rewards the same monopolies that created the vulnerability.
Businesses and citizens also need to stop outsourcing common-sense preparedness to a single vendor. Backups, multi-provider setups, and local redundancy are practical, free-market responses that protect commerce and individual liberty. Real resilience is built bottom-up: entrepreneurs, small providers, and community-based solutions that reduce single points of failure and return control to users rather than centralized platforms.
We cannot sleepwalk while our digital lifelines rest on a house of cards. Whether the next outage is accidental or malicious, the consequences will be spilled blood in the form of lost jobs, frozen transactions, and crippled public services. Conservatives who care about national security, economic freedom, and personal responsibility should demand structural reforms now — because relying on the goodwill of a few private corporations is a dangerous gamble with our prosperity and our safety.
