Cloudflare’s catastrophic outage on 18 November 2025 exposed how fragile today’s cloud dependent systems really are. When one provider failed, countless public services and even internal company tools collapsed instantly. The incident shows why locally installed, self controlled software still matters.

The Cloudflare outage of 2025 and why local tools still matter

On 18 November 2025, Cloudflare’s global infrastructure suffered a major failure when a feature file inside its Bot Management system grew far beyond its expected size, which triggered a cascade of internal software crashes across its network. In a matter of minutes, huge parts of the internet were affected. Social media platforms like X, AI services like ChatGPT, online shops, government sites, and countless smaller services suddenly became unreachable or unusable.

But wait, forget about them for a moment. The far bigger shock came from what happened behind the scenes. Modern developers increasingly build internal company systems on AWS and similar cloud platforms, which, in turn, rely on Cloudflare components for routing, DNS, security, and performance. As a result, countless “internal only” tools, dashboards, CI pipelines, production APIs, authentication systems, internal wikis, and even helpdesk portals went dark. These were never meant to be public facing, but they depended on Cloudflare without anyone questioning that dependency.

Suddenly every company experienced a kind of digital cardiac arrest. Developers could not deploy code, operations teams could not access monitoring tools, employees could not log in, automation scripts stopped mid-process, and entire workflows collapsed simply because a single cloud provider stumbled. The outage did not just break the internet, it broke the internal machinery that keeps modern organisations running.

The frightening part is this, many companies had no idea they were reliant on Cloudflare in the first place. They had outsourced so many layers of infrastructure that the dependency was invisible until it failed.

Cloudflare later confirmed that there was no attack and no malicious activity involved, just a software failure caused by an unexpectedly inflated configuration file. A simple internal change was enough to break a worldwide dependency chain.

The uncomfortable truth

Failures like these should concern all of us. They show how deeply modern infrastructure depends on a few central cloud providers. When one piece falls over, everything stacked above it falls with it. The frightening part is that the outage did not require a hacker, a state actor, or a sophisticated exploit. A bad file size was enough.

A culture of outsourcing responsibility

There is another trend that makes outages like this even worse. Far too many IT departments seem determined to shove absolutely everything into “the cloud,” because the moment something breaks, they can simply point elsewhere. “Not our server, not our responsibility, someone else will fix it.” This culture of outsourcing accountability has become the default in far too many organisations, and it shows every time a provider goes down. And yes, I hate that.

When responsibility disappears into a maze of vendors, support tickets, and service-level agreements, nobody is actually in charge when things break. The result is simple: more fragility and less accountability.

Why local software still matters

Running software locally, whether on your own server, a self-hosted VM, or even a Raspberry Pi, gives you something the cloud can never offer: control. When your core tools run on hardware you own, the failure of a global provider cannot instantly shut down your life or your business.

Local software has real advantages, such as • predictable performance • independence from global outages • lower cascading risks • transparency and direct debugging • no hidden dependencies in someone else’s infrastructure

You do not need to localise everything, but your crucial tools should at least have a fallback path that does not depend on a single provider thousands of kilometres away.

A reminder for the future

The Cloudflare outage lasted only a few hours, but it demonstrated how fragile the world of outsourced IT really is. When one company stumbles, half the internet stumbles with it.

The lesson is clear

Cloud services can be useful, but treating them as your only option is reckless. Your infrastructure is only as stable as the company you hand it over to, and when they fail you fail with them. The convenience of the cloud has fooled many people into giving up control and pretending that responsibility magically disappears once a service runs somewhere else. It does not. There is real power in running software locally, on machines you actually own and understand, without hiding behind outsourced excuses. Sometimes the old ways, the ones where you know exactly what your system does and why it works, are still the safest and sanest path.