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Tuesday, November 18, 2025, 12:48 p.m., a split second is enough to paralyze the digital world
Early Tuesday afternoon, millions of Internet users around the world experienced the troubling experience of a fragmented Internet.
ChatGPT that is no longer responding. X (Twitter) inaccessible. Discord mutes. Claude AI is silent. Even Downdetector, the site that was supposed to report outages, was itself out of service, a cruel irony that perfectly illustrates the extent of the problem.
The cause? A major outage at Cloudflare, this company whose name nobody knows but whose services everyone uses several dozen times a day without knowing it. In the space of a few minutes, nearly 20% of the global web has found itself in digital limbo.
The list of affected services is like an inventory of our daily digital addiction:
The diversity of victims reveals an unsettling truth: we built our digital economy on a single point of failure.
Founded in 2009, Cloudflare has become in a few years one of The most critical infrastructures of the Internet. Its numbers make you dizzy:
Here is the fundamental problem that turns this outage into a strategic alert: Cloudflare is the shield that protects millions of sites from attacks. But What Happens When The Shield Itself Falls?
During the outage, all sites protected by Cloudflare were in a critical situation:
As a 2023 study revealed, there is even a vulnerability that allows an attacker with a Cloudflare account to Route attacks through Cloudflare's own infrastructure To reach other customers. When the service is down, this vulnerability becomes even more worrisome.
12:48 — Cloudflare reports an “internal degradation of its services.” 500 errors are multiplying.
12:50 — Reports are exploding on social networks. Over 5,600 incidents reported for X alone.
13:03 — Cloudflare officially recognizes a “global disruption.”
13:15 - 13:20 — First improvement announced, but errors persisted.
13:27 — Services partially restored.
14:03 — New failure reported.
14:28 — “The problem has been identified and a solution is in progress.”
14:32 — Gradual restoration of certain services (Access, WARP).
The outage lasted approximately 2 hours with intermittent repercussions. For the global digital economy, this represents losses estimated at several tens of millions of dollars.
The GAFAM (Google, Amazon, Facebook, Facebook, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft) built their empire on centralization. Amazon Web Services hosts 33% of the global cloud. Microsoft and Google share 80% of the browsers. This concentration offers remarkable economies of scale:
But It Also Creates Risks Systemic. As this Cloudflare outage, or that of Amazon Web Services last September, demonstrated, A single point of failure can cripple entire sectors of the economy.
The GAFAM now control:
Strategic question : Have we achieved our digital sovereignty for comfort?
For businesses, using Cloudflare, AWS, or Microsoft Azure isn't a luxury choice — it's a Competitive Necessity. Local or European alternatives struggle to offer:
Case study: SanofiThe French pharmaceutical giant has multiplied partnerships with GAFAM (Google, Microsoft) for its digital transformation. Even though he denies any “dependency”, the partial withdrawal of his Onduo joint venture with Verily (Google) shows the difficulty of these asymmetric relationships.
Case study: Hydro-QuebecThe public company justified its use of GAFAM for cloud hosting by the need to have “great computational power for limited periods” (fiscal period, peak demand).
The problem? Once adopted, the ecosystem of a GAFAM becomes Hard to Leave :
Cloudflare, AWS, Azure, Google Cloud have become the Financial institutions in the digital world : too critical to be left to their own devices, but too powerful to be regulated effectively.
Market valuation of key players:
For comparison, the GDP of the Netherlands is around $1 trillion. Each GAFAM is more than a major national economy.
Most of the services affected by the Cloudflare outage are “free” for the end user. But this free service has a hidden cost:
Your data is the product. The GAFAM have built empires of 10 trillion dollars accumulated by monetizing:
The Cambridge Analytica scandal (87 million Facebook users whose data was exploited) was just the tip of the iceberg.
The most worrisome aspect of this outage? Emergency Services Have Been Affected.
In Belgium, the SNCB (rail transport) site was inaccessible. In Australia, during a previous Facebook action, emergency services were cut off during floods.
Our critical infrastructures now depend on private decisions. A contract dispute, a configuration error, a cyber attack — and lives can be put at risk.
1. Diversify your suppliers Don't put all your eggs in one digital basket. Adopt a multi-cloud strategy, even if it's more expensive in the short term.
2. Establish continuity plans What happens to your e-commerce if Shopify falls? To your communication if Slack is down? To Your Data If AWS Shuts Down?
3. Invest in technological sovereigntyEuropean solutions exist: OVHcloud, Scaleway, Gaia-X. They cannot compete in every way with the GAFAM, but they offer strategic independence.
4. Encrypt your critical data Even if it's hosted by a third party, your sensitive data should be encrypted with keys that you control.
The Cloudflare Outage Reminds Us That Resilience is an asset class. Businesses that survive crises are not the biggest, but the most adaptable.
Investment opportunities :
Risks to Watch Out for :
Europe started to react with:
But These Measures Remain Largely Insufficient In the face of the financial and technological firepower of GAFAM, which collectively spend nearly 100 million euros per year in lobbying in Europe.
While Cloudflare went down, another dependency was silently growing stronger: that on Nvidia chips.
CEO Jensen Huang recently warned that “China is going to win the next-gen AI race,” calling on Washington to accelerate. This statement illustrates a new reality: AI is the new oil, and Nvidia makes the refineries.
All the AI services affected by the outage (ChatGPT, Claude, Character.ai) run on servers equipped with Nvidia GPUs. The company's valuation has exceeded 3 trillion dollars, it is worth more than the entire French CAC 40.
Unsettling parallel: If a software outage at Cloudflare can cripple 20% of the web, what would happen if a supply outage of Nvidia chips paralyzed AI data centers around the world?
Tesla embodies another form of centralization: That of connected infrastructure. Its vehicles rely on permanent cloud connections to:
In 2021, a failure in the Tesla servers left Thousands of Owners Unable to Open Their Cars. The parallel with the Cloudflare outage is striking: our physical objects are now dependent on fragile digital infrastructures.
Even the luxury sector is no exception to digital dependence. LVMH, the world's leading luxury group (€380 billion in capitalization), has invested massively in:
But these innovations are based on...
AWS (Amazon), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud. French luxury depends on American infrastructure.
1. Do a handful of private companies control access to information?
The GAFAM are already deciding:
2. is our economy more fragile than before the digital revolution?
A local power outage affects a neighborhood. A Cloudflare outage affects the whole world. Did We Create Systems Technologically Advanced But Structurally Fragile ?
3. has national sovereignty become an illusion?
The American Cloud Act Allows the US government to require access to data stored by an American company, even if that data is hosted in Europe.
Can a European state really be sovereign if its health, fiscal, or defense data passes through company servers subject to American jurisdiction?
4. are we creating monopolies on purpose?
The network effect (the more users, the more useful the service) creates Natural monopolies In the digital world:
Are these monopolies unavoidable? Or the result of a regulatory failure?
5. Are we sacrificing our privacy on the altar of convenience?
Each Google search, each Facebook like, each Amazon order feeds user profiles of terrifying precision. Cambridge Analytica has proven that with enough data, you can influence elections.
Does Comfort Justify This Mass Surveillance?
Promise : Replace centralized servers with decentralized networks (blockchain, IPFS).
Reality : Technologies that are still immature, expensive in energy, difficult to use for the general public.
Exemplo : The network Filecoin promises decentralized storage competing with AWS. But its adoption remains marginal.
Gaia-X (Europe), OVHcloud (France), Scaleway (France) are trying to create alternatives to GAFAM.
Problem : They lack:
Paradox : To reach critical mass, they often have to...
partner with the GAFAM. Gaia-X includes Microsoft and Amazon among its members.
The DMA and the DSA impose obligations on “gatekeepers”:
Effectiveness ? Google has already been condemned several times (record fine of €4.34 billion in 2018), without constantly changing its behavior.
The Software Free Offer an alternative to proprietary solutions:
Challenge : Convince the general public to adopt less “polite” but more ethical solutions.
The Cloudflare outage on November 18, 2025 will be remembered as a stark reminder of our collective vulnerability. It poses an existential question for our digital civilization:
Do we want to live in a world where a few private companies hold the keys to the vital infrastructure of our society?
The choices we make today, as individuals, businesses, and nations, will determine the face of the Internet for decades to come.
Scenario 1: The Strengthened Status Quo GAcams are becoming even more powerful. Cloudflare, AWS, and their peers are absorbing competitors. Oligopoly is becoming a virtual monopoly.
Scenario 2: Fragmentation Each geopolitical block is building its own Internet. A “splinternet” is emerging: American, Chinese, European Internet, which are incompatible with each other.
Scenario 3: The Decentralized Renaissance Web3 technologies are coming of age. A decentralized, resilient, privacy-friendly Internet is emerging. The GAFAM are becoming actors among others.
Which do you prefer? And above all: what are you doing to make it happen?
The biggest CDN in the world. Ultra reliable, very secure.
Ideal: big sites, massive traffic.
The ultra-fast CDN for tech platforms (Shopify, Stripe).
Ideal: demanding e-commerce, SaaS.
Fast, simple, cheap.
Ideal: SMEs, creators, online stores.
Secure and efficient if you're already on AWS.
Ideal: projects requiring scalability.
Cybersecurity specialist: very powerful WAF + anti-DDoS.
Ideal: sensitive sectors (finance, health).
