On November 18, 2025, at 6:20 AM Eastern Time, many of us experienced a network outage. It wasn't a gradual outage, and there were no warning signs. One second you were scrolling through your phone, trading, or chatting with AI; the next, almost everything in sight was a 500 error page. Twitter suddenly crashed while tweeting, ChatGPT stopped responding halfway through a conversation, and Claude froze completely. Even Downdetector—the website you use to check for outages when all platforms are down—couldn't load, unable to tell you that "all services are down." 20% of the world's internet simply vanished, all because Cloudflare, which was supposed to protect the internet from attacks, accidentally "attacked" itself. A routine configuration change (database permission update) triggered a hidden vulnerability in its bot protection system, and in an instant, this "gatekeeper" shut everyone out. In October, when Amazon Web Services (AWS) caused Coinbase to go offline, Twitter users in the cryptocurrency community were still mocking the drawbacks of "centralization." But what happened when the Cloudflare outage occurred in November? At least for the first few hours, the entire crypto community was silent. After all, when the infrastructure Twitter relies on is paralyzed, you simply can't discuss the topic of "infrastructure vulnerability" on Twitter. Multiple critical services stalled (transportation station systems crashed), some companies' web interfaces malfunctioned, and blockchain explorers like Arbiscan and DeFiLlama repeatedly displayed 500 errors—but the blockchain itself showed no signs of consensus failure. When the "decentralized" revolution you tout can't function because a company's configuration file is too large, who is truly in control? Timeline of the Fault: From "Configuration Change" to "Network-wide Outage" UTC 11:05: Database access control change deployment completed. 23 minutes later, at UTC 11:28, the change was applied to user environments, and error records first appeared in user HTTP traffic. In other words: the fault had occurred, but at the time no one knew where the problem lay. As of 11:48 UTC, Cloudflare's official status page finally acknowledged an "internal service failure"—the true meaning of this corporate rhetoric is: "Everything is in chaos, and everyone can see it." The chain reaction was sudden and unexpected: this change disrupted Cloudflare's bot management layer; when the system loaded a feature file that doubled in size, its agent service crashed. Downstream systems subsequently collapsed: Workers KV (key-value storage service) and Access (access control service) could not connect to the agent; the overall error rate soared, and as monitoring tools experienced a surge in load, CPU utilization also exceeded peak levels. Traffic continued to pour into Cloudflare's edge nodes—but the proxy service was unable to respond. Cloudflare initially thought it was under attack, and a massive distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack at that. Even more strangely, the official status page, entirely hosted outside of Cloudflare's infrastructure, also crashed simultaneously, leading engineers to suspect a coordinated attack targeting its core systems and monitoring infrastructure. But this was not the case. They were not under external attack; the problem lay within themselves. Shortly after service was restored, Cloudflare Chief Technology Officer (CTO) Dane Knecht issued a public apology, calling the incident "completely unacceptable" and attributing the outage to a routine configuration change—the very change that triggered the collapse of the bot protection layer. "We let our customers down, and we let down the wider internet user base," Knecht wrote in the statement. "A potential vulnerability in one of the services supporting our bot protection crashed suddenly after a routine configuration change, causing widespread outages to our network and other services. This was not an external attack." At the peak of the outage, the Downdetector platform received as many as 11,183 reports of the outage. This "digital blackout" lasted for more than 5 and a half hours, with service not fully restored until 17:06 UTC; however, the most severe impacts were mitigated as early as 14:30 after the correct robot management configuration files were deployed globally. The impact of the outage: From Web2 to the crypto space, no one was spared. Web2 platforms were hit hardest. Platform X received 9706 outage reports. Users didn't see the familiar timeline; instead, they were greeted with an error message: "Oops, something went wrong." ChatGPT suddenly went silent mid-conversation, ceasing to respond to any commands. Spotify's streaming service was interrupted, the Canva design platform shut down designers, and Uber and DoorDash (a food delivery platform) also experienced functional abnormalities. Even gamers were not spared, with League of Legends players experiencing forced disconnections mid-game. There were even reports that McDonald's self-service ordering machines displayed error messages—the lunch rush coinciding with infrastructure failure. The cryptocurrency sector was also not immune. Crypto platforms experienced widespread outages. Coinbase's front-end completely crashed, leaving users with only an unloadable login page. Kraken's web and mobile applications both failed—a direct consequence of Cloudflare's global outage. BitMEX posted a statement on its status page: "Investigating the cause of the outage; platform performance has decreased, but user funds are safe."—the same scenario, just on a different exchange. Etherscan failed to load, and Arbiscan crashed entirely. DeFiLlama's data analytics dashboard intermittently experienced internal server errors. Even Ledger issued a statement saying that the availability of some services was reduced due to a Cloudflare outage. The only "exception": the blockchain protocol itself. However, the following systems were unaffected: Reportedly, major exchanges such as Binance, OKX, Bybit, Crypto.com, and KuCoin did not experience front-end failures, and on-chain transactions continued normally—while the blockchain itself remained fully operational, showing no signs of consensus disruption. The blockchain protocol always operates independently—the problem isn't on the chain itself, but in the Web2 infrastructure people use to access it. If the blockchain is still running, but no one can access it, is cryptocurrency truly still "online"? In-depth analysis: Why does a database query cripple 20% of the network? Cloudflare doesn't host websites, nor does it provide cloud server services like AWS. Its role is that of a "middleman"—between users and the internet, serving 24 million websites and handling 20% of global internet traffic through nodes in 120 countries and 330 cities. Cloudflare's marketing rhetoric positions itself as an "internet shield and accelerator," providing 24/7 DDoS protection, bot protection, traffic routing, a global Web Application Firewall (WAF), TLS termination, worker-based edge computing, and DNS services—all running on a unified "security-performance" network. The reality is that it holds an 82% market share in DDoS protection, with a total edge node bandwidth of 449 terabits per second (Tbps), and is connected to many mainstream Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and cloud service providers worldwide. The core issue is that when the intermediary fails, all the services behind it simultaneously become "inaccessible." Cloudflare CTO Dane Knecht stated bluntly on the X platform: "Let me be frank: Earlier today, due to a problem with the Cloudflare network, a large amount of traffic that relies on us was affected. We let our customers down, and we let down the wider internet user base." CEO Matthew Prince's statement was even more direct: "Today was Cloudflare's most serious outage since 2019… In the past six years, we have never experienced an outage that caused a significant portion of our core traffic to be unable to pass through our network." The Root Cause of the Fault It all started with a routine database permissions update. At 11:05 UTC, Cloudflare made a change to its ClickHouse database cluster to improve security and reliability—allowing users who previously had "implicit access" to "explicitly" see table metadata. Where did the problem lie? The database query that generated the Cloudflare Bot Protection Service configuration file did not filter the "database name." The query responsible for managing threat traffic began returning duplicate entries—one from the default database and another from the underlying r0 storage database. This caused the feature file size to double, from approximately 60 features to over 200 features. Cloudflare had previously set a hard-coded limit of 200 features for memory pre-allocation, believing this was "far higher than our current actual usage of about 60 features." This is typical engineering thinking: setting a safety margin that one considers "sufficiently loose" until an unexpected event occurs. An excessively large file triggered this limit, causing the Rust code to crash with the error message: "thread fl2_worker_thread panicked: called Result::unwrap() on an Err value". The bot protection system is a core component of Cloudflare's control layer. Once it crashes, the health check system used to inform the load balancer which servers are running also fails. Worse still, this configuration file is regenerated every 5 minutes. Error data is only generated when a query is run on an updated cluster node. Therefore, every 5 minutes, Cloudflare's network switches between "normal" and "failed" states—sometimes loading the correct file, sometimes loading the incorrect one. This constant switching leads engineers to believe they are under a DDoS attack—internal errors typically don't cause a cycle of "recovery and crash." Ultimately, all ClickHouse nodes are updated, and each generated file is incorrect. The "repeated hopping" stopped, replaced by a "complete and stable failure." Without a clear system signal, the system defaulted to "conservative mode," judging most servers as "unhealthy." Traffic continued to pour in, but could not be properly routed. Cloudflare's edge nodes could receive user requests—but could not process them. "This was not an external attack," Knecht repeatedly emphasized. "There was no malicious intent, and it wasn't a DDoS attack. It was simply a database query that missed a filter condition, which happened to coincide with a permission update, ultimately causing the failure." Cloudflare once promised "99.99% availability"—but this time, that promise was not fulfilled. Indeed, that's the case. History repeats itself: 4 major outages in 18 months—why is the centralized dilemma so difficult to solve? October 20, 2025—AWS outage lasted 15 hours. A DNS resolution failure in the DynamoDB database in Zone 1 of the Eastern United States caused Coinbase to freeze, Robinhood to lag, and Infura service to be interrupted (which in turn affected MetaMask). The Base, Polygon, Optimism, Arbitrum, Linea, and Scroll blockchain networks were all taken offline. Although user funds were safe on-chain, many people saw their account balances as "zero." October 29, 2025 – Microsoft Azure outage. A configuration synchronization problem in Azure Front Door caused the Microsoft 365 office suite to be offline, Xbox Live service to be paralyzed, and enterprise services to be interrupted. July 2024 – A vulnerability was found in a Windows update package from CrowdStrike (a security company). This outage caused flight cancellations, hospital medical process delays, and frozen financial services, with full recovery taking several days. June 2022 – Cloudflare's last major outage. Multiple cryptocurrency exchanges were forced to suspend services – the same pattern, only a year later. July 2019 – An even earlier outage for Cloudflare. Coinbase went offline, CoinMarketCap became inaccessible – this was the first "warning sign" that everyone ignored. Within just 18 months, four major infrastructure failures occurred. These four failures convey the same lesson: centralized infrastructure inevitably leads to "centralized failures." Four failures could have accelerated the crypto industry's shift towards decentralization—yet it still relies on infrastructure provided by three companies. How many more warnings will it take for the industry to move from "assuming failures might happen" to "building systems based on the assumption that failures are inevitable"? The "Lie" of Decentralization: Decentralized Protocols Don't Mean Decentralized Access
They once painted this picture for you:
"Decentralized finance, censorship-resistant currencies, trustless systems, no single point of failure, 'If it's not your private key, it's not your coin,' code is law."
The reality on November 18th dealt a heavy blow: a Cloudflare outage in one morning caused some services in the crypto industry to be down for several hours.
The reality on November 18th was a heavy blow: a cloudflare outage in one morning caused some services in the crypto industry to be down for several hours.
The Technical Truth: No blockchain protocols have been reported to malfunction. The Bitcoin network is functioning normally, and the Ethereum network is functioning normally—the chains themselves are not the problem. The Reality in Use: Exchange interfaces crash, blockchain explorers are paralyzed, wallet interfaces are ineffective, data analytics platforms are down, and trading interfaces display 500 errors. Users cannot access the decentralized blockchain they should "own." The protocol itself functions normally—provided you can "access" it. The following statements may sound harsh to many… David Schwed, Chief Operating Officer (COO) of SovereignAI, bluntly points out: "The Cloudflare outage today, and the AWS outage a few weeks ago, clearly demonstrate that we cannot simply outsource the 'fault resilience' of our infrastructure to a single vendor. If your organization needs to operate 24/7, you must build your infrastructure according to the standard that 'failures are inevitable.' If your business continuity plan only includes 'waiting for the vendor to restore service,' that is pure negligence." "Pure negligence"—not an accident, not an oversight, but a deliberate oversight. Jameson Lopp's assessment is spot on: "We have a great decentralized technology, but by concentrating most of the service in the hands of a few providers, we make it extremely vulnerable." Ben Schiller's words during the last AWS outage are equally applicable today: "If your blockchain can go offline because of an AWS outage, it's not decentralized enough." Replace "AWS" with "Cloudflare," and the problem remains exactly the same—the industry has never learned its lesson. Why choose "convenience" over "principle"? Building your own infrastructure means: purchasing expensive hardware, ensuring a stable power supply, maintaining dedicated bandwidth, hiring security experts, achieving geographical redundancy, building a disaster recovery system, and 24/7 monitoring—each requiring a significant investment of resources. Using Cloudflare, however, only requires: clicking a button, entering credit card information, and deployment within minutes. DDoS protection is handled by others, availability is guaranteed by others, and scaling is a concern for others. Startups prioritize "rapid IPOs," and venture capital firms demand "capital efficiency"—everyone chooses "convenience" over "fault tolerance." Until the moment "convenience" ceases to be convenient. The AWS outage in October sparked endless discussions on Twitter about "decentralization." And the Cloudflare outage in November? Utter silence. Not out of "philosophical silence," nor "quiet after deep thought." Rather, it was because: people wanted to complain, but found that their favorite platform for complaining (Twitter) was also paralyzed due to infrastructure failure. When "single point of failure" happens to be the very platform you use to mock it, you have nothing to complain about. When the access layer relies on the infrastructure of three companies, two of which experience outages within the same month, "decentralization at the protocol level" is meaningless. If users cannot access the blockchain, then what exactly are we "decentralizing"? Monopoly Dilemma: Three Companies Control 60% of the Cloud Market, Where is the Crypto Industry Headed? AWS controls approximately 30% of the global cloud infrastructure market, Microsoft Azure 20%, and Google Cloud 13%. These three companies control over 60% of the cloud infrastructure that underpins the modern internet. The crypto industry, which was supposed to be a "centralized" solution, now relies on the world's most centralized infrastructure. The Crypto Industry's "Centralized Dependency List" Coinbase – relies on AWS; Binance, BitMEX, Huobi, and Crypto.com – all rely on AWS; Kraken, while building its infrastructure on AWS, was still impacted by Cloudflare's CDN (Content Delivery Network) failures. Many exchanges that claim to be "decentralized" actually run on centralized infrastructure. There's another key difference between the October and November outages: When AWS failed, Platform X (formerly Twitter) continued to function, allowing crypto Twitter users to mock the "fragility of infrastructure." However, when Cloudflare failed, Platform X also went offline. When the platform you use to "mock a single point of failure" is itself part of that "single point of failure," you can't laugh at all. This irony brought the industry discussion to a standstill from the very beginning. Three major outages within 30 days have drawn significant attention from regulators. The core issues regulators need to address are: Are these companies considered "systemically important"? Should internet backbone services be subject to "utility-style regulation"? What risks arise when the "too big to fail" attribute is combined with technological infrastructure? If Cloudflare controls 20% of global internet traffic, does this constitute a monopoly? Corinne Cath-Speth of Article 19 bluntly stated during the last AWS outage: "When one vendor goes down, critical services go down—media becomes inaccessible, secure communication applications like Signal stop working, and the infrastructure supporting the digital society crumbles. We urgently need to diversify cloud computing." In other words, governments are increasingly realizing that a few companies are enough to bring the internet to a standstill. In fact, decentralized alternatives already exist, but no one has been willing to adopt them. Examples include Arweave for storage, IPFS for distributed file transfer, Akash for computing, and Filecoin for decentralized hosting. Why are decentralized solutions "praised but not adopted"? Performance lags behind centralized solutions, and latency issues are immediately noticeable to users. Adoption rate is extremely low; compared to the convenient experience of "clicking 'Deploy to AWS'," the user operation process for decentralized solutions is cumbersome and complex. Cost is often higher than renting infrastructure from the "Big Three" (AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud). The reality is: Building truly decentralized infrastructure is extremely difficult, far beyond what is imagined. Most projects only pay lip service to "decentralization," but rarely actually implement it. Choosing a centralized solution is always seen as the simpler and cheaper option—until four failures occurred within 18 months, people realized the huge cost hidden behind "simple and cheap." In a recent CoinDesk column, Dr. Max Li, CEO of OORT, directly addressed the hypocrisy of the industry: "For an industry that prides itself on 'decentralization' and constantly touts its advantages, yet heavily relies on fragile centralized cloud platforms for its infrastructure, this is inherently hypocritical." His proposed solution is a hybrid cloud strategy, allowing exchanges to distribute their critical systems across decentralized networks. While centralized cloud platforms remain irreplaceable in terms of performance and scale—when billions of dollars are involved and every second of trading is critical—their resilience is far inferior to distributed solutions. Only when the cost of "convenience" is severe enough to change industry behavior patterns will "ideas" triumph over "convenience." Clearly, the November 18th outage wasn't severe enough, nor was the October 20th AWS outage, nor the July 2024 CrowdStrike outage. At what point will "decentralized infrastructure" transform from a "topic of conversation" into a "mandatory requirement"? On November 18th, the crypto industry did not "fail"—the blockchain itself functioned perfectly. The real "failure" is the industry's collective self-deception: believing that "unstoppable applications" could be built on "faulty infrastructure"; believing that "censorship resistance" still had practical significance when three companies controlled the "access channels"; believing that "decentralization" was truly decentralized when a single Cloudflare configuration file could determine whether millions of people could transact. If the blockchain is still generating blocks, but no one can submit transactions, is it truly "online"? The industry has no contingency plans. When a failure occurs, all they can do is wait for Cloudflare to fix it, for AWS to restore service, and for Azure to deploy patches. This is the current industry's "disaster recovery strategy." Imagine what would happen if digital identity were deeply integrated with blockchain? The US Treasury Department is pushing for the embedding of identity credentials into smart contracts, requiring every DeFi interaction to undergo KYC verification. When the next infrastructure failure occurs, users will lose more than just transaction privileges—they will also lose the ability to "prove their identity" within the financial system. What would normally be a 3-hour outage would become a 3-hour "unloading human verification interface"—simply because the verification service is running on paralyzed infrastructure. The "safety barrier" that regulators want to build is based on the premise that "infrastructure is always online." But the outage on November 18th proved that this premise simply doesn't hold true. When the problem of "over-surveillance" becomes glaringly obvious, tech professionals turn to "privacy protection." Perhaps now is the time to include "infrastructure resilience" in this category. It shouldn't be a "dispensable bonus," but rather a "fundamental requirement that supports everything"—without it, all other functions are meaningless. The next outage is brewing—it could come from AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, or even a secondary failure of Cloudflare. It could be next month, or it could be next week. The infrastructure remains the same, the dependencies remain the same, and the industry incentives remain the same. Choosing a centralized solution will remain the cheaper, faster, and more convenient option—until it no longer is. When Cloudflare's next routine configuration change triggers a hidden vulnerability in another critical service, we will witness the familiar scenario again: a deluge of 500 error pages, a complete halt to transactions, a blockchain functioning normally but inaccessible to anyone, the inability to tweet about "decentralization" only to find Twitter paralyzed, and the company's promise to "do better next time" never being fulfilled. Nothing will change, because "convenience" will always triumph over "risk prevention"—until the cost of "convenience" becomes too great to ignore. This time, the "gatekeeper" was down for three and a half hours. Next time, the outage might last longer; next time, it might occur during a market crash where "every second counts"; next time, the identity verification system might also be caught in the crossfire. When the infrastructure you rely on for survival collapses at your most vulnerable moment, whose fault is it?
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