Cloudflare Outage Exposes Web3’s Centralization Vulnerability
A widespread Cloudflare outage on Nov. 19 caused disruptions across exchanges, wallets, block explorers and decentralized applications, demonstrating how a single CDN provider can materially affect the crypto stack. Many services became partially or fully inaccessible despite operating on decentralized ledgers, illustrating that network-layer failures still bring the ecosystem to a halt.
The incident matters because it exposes an operational blind spot: decentralizing consensus and custody does not eliminate dependence on centralized routing, DNS and CDN services. Projects and operators are likely to accelerate diversification steps—multi-CDN strategies, decentralized DNS and peer-to-peer fallbacks—to reduce single points of failure. Investors and users should weigh not just protocol design but also the resilience of the infrastructure that connects them to on-chain systems.