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Early on November 18, 2025, the internet took another gut punch when Cloudflare — one of the backbone firms that routes traffic for millions of websites — suffered a major outage that left people locked out of essential online services. The disruption rippled across continents and lasted for hours before engineers were able to bring systems back online, reminding Americans that our digital lifelines are far more fragile than most of us assume.
Millions of users found themselves staring at error screens when familiar services like X, Spotify, ChatGPT, Canva, and others went dark, illustrating how outages at one company can cripple whole swaths of daily life and commerce. Businesses, commuters, and families had to scramble as commerce, communications, and even some transit systems experienced interruptions because they rely on the same few gatekeepers.
Cloudflare later traced the failure to a software crash tied to an oversized configuration file used to manage incoming traffic, a mundane-sounding technical issue with extraordinarily consequential results. Whether accidental or the result of human error, the fact that a single misconfiguration can cascade into continent-wide outages should set off alarm bells in Washington and among corporate boards.
This isn’t theoretical. Cloudflare handles roughly one-fifth of global web traffic, meaning its failures don’t just inconvenience users — they seize up important parts of the economy and free speech infrastructure. When so much of the web funnels through a handful of providers, the whole system becomes a target-rich environment for accidents, mismanagement, or worse.
Just weeks earlier the country endured a crippling Amazon Web Services outage that took down games, apps, and business services worldwide, proving this consolidation problem is a pattern, not an anomaly. Dependence on a tiny number of cloud giants makes any local failure a systemic risk, and we’re watching those systemic risks multiply in real time.
Some in the media will soothe you by calling these events merely technical glitches, and Cloudflare insists it will publish a postmortem to explain what went wrong. That’s not good enough; we don’t live in an era where “we’re investigating” should be the final word while millions lose access to commerce and communication.
Conservative Americans should be loud and blunt about the remedy: decentralize, diversify, and demand redundancy. Break up the choke points, require critical infrastructure plans that include nonproprietary backups, and incentivize smaller, regional providers so an outage at one giant doesn’t mean a blackout for the rest of the country.
If Washington won’t act out of principle, then sensible regulations and market pressure must force tech firms to build resilience — not spin PR. Patriotism means protecting the systems that underpin our economy and our liberties, and that starts with refusing to accept a digital monoculture that can be taken down by one bad configuration or one crowded server farm.
