The Invisible Web Giant: How Cloudflare Powers a Fifth of the Internet (and What Happens When It Falters)

Cloudflare is the type of backstage hero most users of the internet will never see, but it is something that is infused into the core of the modern web. It works silently behind millions of sites to make them run faster, keep secure, and be available to the people around the world. However, that silent position hides the reality of how central Cloudflare has become. Any failure on its part will be felt over the internet in a few minutes.

Cloudflare is an infrastructure for an immense portion of the web today. W3Techs data indicates that almost a fifth of all websites use Cloudflare as a reverse proxy. Cloudflare manages over 15% of the world on the DNS side, the phonebook of the internet. In other words, when on average five websites are accessed per person, Cloudflare is somewhere in the background keeping things afloat.

What You Didn’t Know About Cloudflare

It has not been used everywhere without a reason. Cloudflare extremely increases the performance of websites by hosting the data in data centers that are nearer to the users all around the globe. It also protects websites against cyberattacks, particularly distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, which can flood servers. Its worldwide edge system enhances reliability, which means that the sites will be accessible even when there is an unexpected burst in traffic. And to develop it, Cloudflare has become an effective platform-providing edge computing, bot-management, and powerful traffic control, which simplifies the development of modern applications.

However, there is a downside to Cloudflare’s dominance, which is centralization. A company that is fully integrated within the infrastructure of the internet can be a failure point. When Cloudflare experiences a technical malfunction, sets up a system, or loses operation, the effects would not be localized, but propagated across thousands of services, applications, and companies all at once. Scholars examining the future of internet resilience have indicated this type of consolidation is efficient but it renders the web more vulnerable than it looks.

Does the World Stand Still When Cloudflare Suffers A Downtime?

Last week, Cloudflare gave the world a wake-up call by reminding the world of the extent to which it relies on the internet. Something that initially appeared as a relatively ordinary internal reform soon turned into an international catastrophe, with users baffled as the leading platforms, such as X, ChatGPT, and various online services, started to display error messages or even not load. To a large number of users, this seemed like half the internet had a glitch.

Image Credit: Cloudflare

The problem began in the systems of Cloudflare and not a cyber attack, as many people initially thought. There was an accidental bug in the database permissions that caused a bug in the Cloudflare infrastructure. This bug led to one of the internal company configuration files, namely a bot-management file, becoming much larger than it should have been. That large file was then automatically loaded into the global Cloudflare network, where it was exposed to systems that were not designed to deal with it. The proxies were unable to handle the sudden surge of traffic, and before long, services failed, and the error messages were published on the web.

The fact that Cloudflare is so significant does not only have to do with its size, but also with the contribution it makes to the well-being of the internet. It serves as a backup system, ensuring websites remain quick and open. It is a security gateway that filters out bad traffic before it gets to the servers of a company. Its edge computing innovations enable developers to create applications that respond virtually in real-time, regardless of the user’s location. However, all that strength is that in case Cloudflare fails, a large part of the digital world fails along with it.