Major Cloud Outages Highlight Growing Strain on Global Internet Infrastructure

Himasha Dissanayake, JadeTimes Staff

H. Dissanayake is a Jadetimes news reporter covering Technology

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Source: © Thomas Fuller/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images

A series of high-profile tech disruptions in recent weeks has left millions of users worldwide frustrated and highlighted the growing fragility of the internet systems people rely on every day. On Tuesday, a technical issue at Cloudflare briefly disrupted major online platforms including Spotify, ChatGPT and former President Donald Trump’s Truth Social, marking yet another significant outage for the digital ecosystem.

The incident follows similar service interruptions at Amazon Web Services (AWS) last month and Microsoft Azure just days later. These recurring glitches underscore a broader challenge: society’s increasing dependence on a handful of cloud providers that support countless apps, businesses and personal services.

According to industry experts, such outages though inconvenient are not unusual. “It really almost doesn’t matter how well-situated the provider is,” said Eileen Haggerty, vice president at Netscout. “Tech disruptions like these are very, very common problems.”

Cloudflare confirmed that Tuesday’s disruption resulted from a configuration file that became too large, triggering a software crash. Chief Technology Officer Dane Knecht said a routine update caused the bug, which “cascaded into a broad degradation” across the company’s network. “Work is already underway to make sure it does not happen again,” he added.

Similarly, AWS’ recent outage stemmed from a bug involving two automated systems attempting to update the same data simultaneously. As reliance on major cloud providers grows, even minor internal errors can have massive ripple effects for users worldwide.

Data from Downdetector shows more than 2.1 million users reported issues during Cloudflare’s outage alone. The company processes an average of 81 million HTTP requests per second—so disruptions quickly impact a wide swath of the web.

While the frequency of outages hasn’t dramatically increased, their impact has, experts say. More websites and applications rely on these major providers than ever before. Cisco’s ThousandEyes recorded 12 major outages in 2025 so far, compared to 23 in 2024 and 13 in 2023. Configuration errors, cascading failures and hidden system issues are among the common patterns observed this year.

As global dependency on digital services deepens, experts caution that these incidents will continue. “They aren’t something you’d say, ‘Well, thank God that would never happen to us,’” Haggerty noted. “All of these could actually happen to any business.”

The recent disruptions serve as a stark reminder that even the internet’s biggest players remain vulnerable—and that widespread outages may be an unavoidable part of a hyper-connected world.