Why We Need to Decentralize Global Internet Services

Global Outages Raise Alarms Over Internet Centralization and Infrastructure Fragility

July 2, 2025 — Own Meta Newsroom

In a digital era where life, business, and communication hinge on internet connectivity, recent major outages have exposed alarming vulnerabilities in the global web infrastructure. From fintech platforms and social networks to airline systems and media giants, the world watched as websites blinked offline, services stalled, and the illusion of a seamless internet cracked.

On June 27, a major disruption at Cloudflare, a cornerstone of global web infrastructure, temporarily took down tens of thousands of websites—including major news outlets, e-commerce platforms, crypto exchanges, and banking portals. The issue, which stemmed from a routing misconfiguration combined with a DDoS mitigation failure, lasted over two hours, causing ripple effects worldwide. It wasn’t the first time this year either.

Just weeks prior, Fastly, another edge cloud provider, also experienced a system-wide failure due to a flawed update that propagated through its content delivery network (CDN). The resulting blackout froze services like Spotify, Reddit, Twitch, and parts of Amazon. And last month, a suspected state-sponsored cyberattack overwhelmed Akamai’s DNS infrastructure, briefly crippling access to many U.S.-based government and media websites.

These events, once considered rare and isolated, are now occurring with increasing frequency and broader impact.

“This is no longer a question of if critical infrastructure can go down, but when—and for how long,” said Neil Frey, a cybersecurity analyst at the Digital Resilience Institute. “We are stress-testing the entire structure of the internet. The results aren’t comforting.”

A Wake-Up Call to the WWW: Too Much Power in Too Few Hands?

The outages underscore a growing concern among internet theorists, developers, and digital rights advocates: the danger of centralization. When companies like Cloudflare, Akamai, and Fastly provide critical backbone services to a disproportionate share of the web, a single point of failure can cascade across the globe.

“We’ve essentially put all our eggs in a few very shiny baskets,” says Alice Chen, an open internet researcher. “That’s convenient—until it breaks.”

For some, these incidents have ignited suspicion. The coordinated timing, the rare scale, and the lack of transparency in postmortems have spurred online debate: Were these “stress tests” initiated by governments or private players? Was this a demonstration of power? Or simply evidence that the system is unsustainable in its current form?

On social media platforms and privacy forums, users speculated:

• “Was this a dry run for a digital lockdown?”
• “Central control over the internet is a massive vulnerability—not just technical, but political.”
• “If we’re this fragile, who’s really in charge when the web goes dark?”

A Push for Decentralized Internet Alternatives

In response to repeated failures, momentum is building for distributed models of the internet—where responsibility and functionality are shared across many nodes, rather than concentrated in a handful of companies.

Projects like the InterPlanetary File System (IPFS), Web3-based hosting, and blockchain-powered DNS services are gaining traction. Advocates argue that decentralization increases resilience, offers censorship resistance, and prevents monopolistic control.

“Decentralized protocols can’t be taken down by one configuration error or cyberattack,” says Jerome Davis, founder of a peer-to-peer web project. “It’s time we stop treating the internet like a corporate product and start treating it like a public utility.”

What Happens Next?

Governments are also beginning to take notice. The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has launched a review into dependency on a handful of service providers, while the EU Commission is pushing for internet infrastructure diversification as part of its Digital Resilience Act.

But critics warn that regulation may only further entrench the current players unless alternatives are deliberately nurtured.

As the internet grows more vital—and more vulnerable—the debate is clear: do we double down on central management and hope it holds, or invest in new models where failure of one doesn’t mean collapse for all?

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