Yesterday’s Cloudflare outage wasn’t an outage. It was a design failure

When Cloudflare went dark, half of the internet staggered with it. People kept calling it an “outage.” Let’s be honest: it was a structural failure baked into how today’s web works.

A centralized DNS stack is incredibly efficient right up to the moment it collapses. And when that single point of failure snaps, nothing downstream matters. Millions of websites freeze because one company sneezes.

We’ve normalized this fragility for way too long.

If yesterday proved anything, it’s this: the modern internet still depends on chokepoints that have no business existing in 2025.

Centralization wasn’t a mistake. It was a shortcut. And shortcuts always invoice us later.

The alternative isn’t theoretical. Decentralized naming systems are finally maturing, and they don’t break just because a single provider does. Not because they’re magical or perfect, but because mathematically they can’t collapse the same way centralized DNS does.

Several experimental architectures have been exploring this direction for years, including ledger-based distributed name systems that remove the root-layer bottleneck entirely. The point is: the path forward exists — we just haven’t committed to it as an internet community.

Yesterday wasn’t a warning. It was a preview.

The next outage won’t be a wake-up call. It’ll be a consequence.

It’s time to rethink the root layer of the internet, not patch it.

Resilient systems aren’t optional anymore. They’re overdue.