Is the Cloud your Single Point of Failure?

Early lessons from the Cloudflare Outage of November 18, 2025:

At approximately 11:00 UTC on November 18, 2025, a large portion of the internet simply stopped working.

Sites like ChatGPT returned HTTP 500 errors. Twitter/X was unreachable for millions. League of Legends players were kicked mid-match. Betting platforms froze during live events. Even Downdetector, the very site we use to check if something is down, went dark for a time.

The culprit? A single internal degradation at Cloudflare, one of the world’s most trusted edge providers.

In under three hours, a company that proudly claims “we’ve never had a global outage… until we do” reminded the entire industry of a brutal truth: in the cloud era, someone else’s infrastructure is your single point of failure if you treat it as infallible.

The Illusion of “Someone Else’s Problem”

Cloudflare powers more than 20% of the top one million websites and acts as the DNS, CDN, WAF, or Zero Trust gateway for countless others, including OpenAI, Discord, and large parts of X’s API layer. Most organizations adopted Cloudflare because it is fast, secure, and, crucially, operated by experts. The unspoken contract was simple: “You handle resilience; we’ll handle our application.”

That contract shattered on November 18.

A routine maintenance window in Santiago combined with an unidentified internal service failure cascaded into global 500 errors. There was no cyberattack, no malicious actor, just the ordinary fragility of highly centralized, highly optimized systems.

The result was a masterclass in cascading dependency:

• Companies that had removed their own origin firewalls because “Cloudflare does it better” were suddenly exposed.
• Startups that pointed their apex domains straight at Cloudflare without secondary DNS lost their entire online presence.
• SaaS products that used Cloudflare Access or Workers KV as a single source of truth watched their own SLAs collapse, even though their own code was healthy.

The Real Cost of “All Eggs, One Basket”

This was not the first warning, nor will it be the last.

June 2025: Google Cloud networking outage took down Spotify, Snapchat, and half the internet’s OAuth logins.

October 2025: An AWS Route 53 misconfiguration made thousands of domains temporarily unresolvable.

November 2025: Cloudflare reminds us that even the most battle-tested providers are not immune.

Yet many organizations still architect as if these events are theoretical. Common anti-patterns exposed on November 18:

Building Actual High Availability in a Cloud-First World

True resilience in 2025 is no longer about being deployed to two or more data centers. It is about refusing to grant any third party a silent veto over your availability. Practical, battle-tested, traditional IT policies would have blunted or eliminated the impact:

1. Multi-CDN / Multi-DNS: Route 53 + Cloudflare, or Cloudflare + Akamai + Fastly. Yes, it costs more and adds operational complexity. It also prevents global outages.

2. Secondary Origin Shielding: Keep at least one bypass path (direct IP or alternate edge) that can be enabled via DNS TTL changes when the primary edge fails.

3. Never make the control plane the data plane: Do not require the Cloudflare dashboard to be online in order to serve traffic. Cache aggressively; use LOCKED Workers edges or immutable deploys.

4 .Failover-aware authentication: If you use Cloudflare Access or Gateway, have a documented “break-glass” procedure (e.g., temporary Okta-only path) that can be activated when the provider itself is unreachable.

5. Chaos engineering, not hope engineering: Regularly test “what if our primary CDN/DNS/ZT provider disappears for four hours?” Most companies discovered on November 18 that they had never run that drill.

The New Rule of the Cloud Era

The use of the cloud did not eliminate single points of failure; it merely moved them up the stack and made them someone else’s issue. But, who is responsible? 

The organizations that recover fastest on November 18 are not the ones with the biggest Cloudflare contracts. They are the ones that had treated Cloudflare as a capable, but fallible provider, and planned for an outage.

Until every engineering team internalizes that distinction, we will keep having these wake-up calls. The only question is whose turn it will be next month.

The internet is now a chain of highly optimized monopolies and oligopolies. Your job is to make sure your company is never the weakest link, or the one left dangling when someone else’s link breaks.