Why does the internet keep crashing so often in 2025?

Cloudflare suffered a major breakdown on November 18, and it brought many major platforms with it. OpenAI, Spotify, X and Canva are just some of the websites and services that went down Tuesday morning.

Do you feel like you’re experiencing déjà vu? Well, that’s not the case.

The recent Cloudflare outage should not be confused with the recent Microsoft Azure outage, which caused Xbox, Minecraft, and other platforms to go down. And don’t forget the other major incident which happened in Octoberwhen issues at Amazon Web Services (AWS) led to Amazon, Reddit, Snapchat and other major platforms going offline. It’s also completely separate from the June outage, when Google Cloud Platform (GCP) And Cloudflare took down entire sections of the Internet

OK, so the biggest websites and internet platforms have been shrinking a lot lately. What is going on here?

Why do so many websites go down at once?

These large social media platforms, e-commerce sites, and gaming networks all use the same few large service providers to host and distribute their content, Cloudflare being one of them.

Cloudflare is one of the largest Content Delivery Networks (CDN), a system that manages web traffic. When Cloudflare is operating normally, it manages web traffic and protects platforms from attacks.

“CDNs are distributed infrastructures that accelerate content delivery and improve user experience by caching and serving web content closer to users,” explained Angelique Medinahead of internet intelligence at network intelligence company Cisco ThousandEyes, at Mashable. “They essentially serve as a ‘front door’ to websites and applications, with users connecting to Cloudflare’s servers rather than those of its customers.

“When this ‘front door’ becomes unavailable, users lose the entry point to many sites and applications,” Medina said. “Given the large number of customers and sites they serve, any significant disruption to their ability to deliver content could effectively render large parts of the Internet inaccessible to users.”

Basically, the Internet has consolidated and we are all reaping the benefits of that consolidation.

“This is not just another technical setback,” said Ramutė Varnelytė, CEO of IPXOa leading IP resource management platform in Europe, in a statement provided to Mashable. “This is further evidence of exposure [the] The digital economy is caused by various dysfunctions at just a few digital infrastructure service providers.

Are internet outages more common?

In the early days of the Internet, there were countless web hosting providers and many companies even operated their own dedicated servers. Now, businesses large and small all use the same few cloud service providers, whether it’s AWS, GCP, or Azure. Cloudflare makes the Internet even more vulnerable to disruption because the company has no direct direct competitor.

“The incident further highlights the inherent danger that the entire Internet infrastructure depends on a few service providers,” Varnelytė said.

But is that it? And are these services really down more than usual? According to Cisco ThousandEyes, which tracks breakdowns And the mapsthat’s correct. Web downtime is not occurring more than usual, although seems in this way.

“Cisco ThousandEyes has not seen an increase in the frequency of service outages among cloud and internet infrastructure providers; however, the number of sites and applications relying on these services has increased,” Medina shared. “As these services increasingly become a point of centralization – with a small number of companies managing large swaths of the internet – if something goes wrong, it can lead to disruption of many sites and applications around the world.”

In short, the number of disturbances is not increasing. On the contrary, the shock waves of individual incidents are amplified.