Cloud outages are never just technical failures, they expose a deeper and far more uncomfortable truth about our blind dependence on centralised infrastructure. Every time a major provider collapses, the world realises how recklessly we have handed control, autonomy, and responsibility to a handful of corporations that do not share our priorities. If we continue to build everything on these fragile external pillars, we should not be surprised when the next collapse takes half the internet down with it.
Addendum to my Cloudflare post
There is one more truth that needs to be stated clearly. When companies push everything into the cloud they are not only giving up control over their infrastructure, they are directing money straight into the pockets of billionaires who avoid taxes and collect yachts the way other people collect postcards. The cloud is not a neutral convenience, it is a financial pipeline that drains value from your community and sends it to people who will never contribute anything meaningful to your city.
Local solutions create a completely different outcome because they anchor both the responsibility and the economic value directly in your community. A local server does not float in some anonymous data centre owned by people who have never heard of your town, it sits in a real building, maintained by a real technician who might very well shop at the same supermarket you do. A local consultant is not a faceless support ticket system, but a person who understands your environment, your constraints, your goals, and who reinvests their earnings into the same regional economy that sustains your business. Money spent on local infrastructure circulates instead of disappearing, it pays salaries for local engineers, it pays rent and mortgages, it pays groceries for families that actually live in your region, and it strengthens the social and economic fabric around you instead of siphoning value into distant corporate accounts. Every decision to stay local, every server you host yourself, every contract you give to a nearby specialist, keeps wealth exactly where it belongs, in your own environment, not locked away in offshore tax structures or consumed by companies that will never return anything meaningful to your community.
The idea that cloud is always smarter is a myth. A cloud first mindset weakens local resilience, undermines local expertise, and hands responsibility to providers who will never be accountable to you. If you want stability, if you want real control, and if you want economic value to stay where you actually live, then keep your infrastructure local.
Net-Worth snapshot of some Cloud/Tech CEOs
These numbers make something painfully obvious. The wealth accumulated by the people who run the major cloud providers is not the result of magic innovation, it is the direct consequence of a global shift toward centralised infrastructure, a shift that extracts value from thousands of regions and concentrates it in the hands of a tiny elite. Every time a company decides to move its systems into the cloud it is not only paying for compute capacity, it is contributing to this consolidation of power and capital. Money that could stay in your city, money that could pay local salaries, money that could support local expertise, is instead redirected to individuals who already control unimaginable sums and who have no connection to your community.
This is the economic reality behind the cloud narrative. When people talk about convenience and scalability, they rarely mention the social cost, the slow erosion of local technical ecosystems, and the reduction of local resilience. Cloud adoption is not neutral, it has a winner, and it is never your local economy. The more we rely on centralised platforms, the more we feed the machine that creates billionaires who will never reinvest in your region and will never be affected by the consequences of your infrastructure decisions. Keeping systems local is not only a technical decision, it is an economic and social stance, a choice to keep value circulating where it belongs.
| Name | Company / Role | Approximate Net Worth* | |------|----------------|-------------------------| | Matthew Prince (CEO and Co-Founder of Cloudflare) | Cloudflare Inc | ~$2.3 billion (as of March 2023) | | Michelle Zatlyn (Co-Founder and President/COO of Cloudflare) | Cloudflare Inc | ~$1.6 billion (as of 2025) | | Jeff Bezos (Founder of Amazon) | Amazon and Amazon Web Services | > $220 billion (as of May 2025) | | Larry Ellison (Co-Founder of Oracle Corporation) | Oracle and Cloud Infrastructure | > $275 billion (estimated July 2025) |
* Approximate figures based on publicly available reports, subject to variation by source and date.