For the second time in as many months, vast swathes of the internet briefly vanished this morning after another Cloudflare outage rippled across the web. Sites that depend on the company’s sprawling network found themselves timing out, stuttering or simply refusing to load, prompting a familiar mix of frustration and resignation from publishers, developers and the unfortunate people tasked with “just keeping the website online”.
Cloudflare – the content-delivery giant that bills itself as the internet’s defence shield, accelerator and traffic cop, has become so embedded in the modern web that when it sneezes, half the digital world catches a cold. But with outages now a recurring theme, a once-unthinkable question is starting to creep into conversations: does every website really need Cloudflare?
What Cloudflare actually does, and why so many rely on it
Cloudflare’s position in the web’s hierarchy is deceptively simple: it sits between a website and the people trying to visit it. In practice, that means it handles everything from DNS and caching to bot-blocking and DDoS defence. Many sites, from tiny blogs to major newsrooms, use it as their first and last line of protection.
Its appeal is obvious. Pages load faster. Attacks get filtered. Traffic surges don’t melt servers. For smaller publishers, Cloudflare is the infrastructure they could never afford to build themselves.
This centralisation has long been pitched as a strength. Today, it increasingly looks like a liability.
When Cloudflare goes down, the internet goes with it
Because Cloudflare acts as a reverse proxy, its outages don’t just slow things down, they take entire websites offline. This morning was no exception. Homepages failed to load, images vanished, login pages hung indefinitely, and error codes appeared with a frequency normally reserved for badly behaved WordPress plugins.
Depending on Cloudflare means your site’s availability is, quite literally tied to the health of a single private company. And when that company hiccups, thousands of organisations suddenly find themselves invisible.
For media outlets, e-commerce stores and subscription services, even a few minutes offline means lost revenue. For everyone else, it simply means a reminder: the infrastructure we treat as foundational is nowhere near as stable as we like to pretend.
So do we need Cloudflare?
The honest answer is complicated and uncomfortable.
The argument for sticking with it
- It is, for many sites, the only affordable way to defend against modern threats.
- Its global network genuinely improves performance.
- Removing Cloudflare can leave sites wide open to DDoS attacks, scraping, spam and traffic floods.
The argument for rethinking the whole arrangement
- Outsourcing so much of the internet to a single provider creates exactly the kind of vulnerability the web was supposed to avoid.
- The benefits for dynamic, API-heavy or constantly updated sites are far smaller than people assume.
- Few organisations have serious contingency plans for “What happens when Cloudflare breaks?” even though it happens often enough to merit one.
In other words: Cloudflare’s advantages are real, but so is the risk of building your business atop someone else’s single point of failure.
The invisible issue: AI bots and the next era of web stress
Cloudflare’s recent boast – that it has blocked 416 billion AI-scraping requests since July, hints at the scale of a growing problem: AI models vacuuming the web without permission, often through automated bots. For publishers and creators, these bots can siphon content faster than it can be published.
When Cloudflare is up, its bot-management tools are one of the few effective defences most websites have.
When Cloudflare is down? Those protections evaporate instantly.
In an internet increasingly shaped by automated scraping, this creates a troubling paradox: Cloudflare is both a necessity and an Achilles heel. Websites may need its shielding more than ever, even as relying on it introduces its own form of existential fragility.
The bigger picture: too much internet in one basket
Today’s outage won’t topple Cloudflare, nor will it spark a mass exodus. The service remains powerful, affordable and, for many, unavoidable.
But it does underline something the tech world has been slow to confront: a web dominated by a handful of centralised gatekeepers is one hardware glitch or software bug away from collective paralysis. And as AI bots multiply and online threats grow more sophisticated, the risks of relying on a single guardian only increase.
Cloudflare isn’t going anywhere. But neither is the question this morning’s outage raises:
Should the internet keep placing so much trust in one company and what happens when that trust falters?
Media M 
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