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Millions of Americans woke up to a shocking reminder of how fragile our modern life has become when a major Cloudflare failure left popular services unreachable on November 18, 2025. Workers, small businesses, and ordinary families found themselves locked out of tools they rely on every day — from social platforms to AI assistants — as screens returned error messages instead of access.
Cloudflare later explained the outage stemmed from a sudden spike in unusual traffic and an oversized automatically generated configuration that overwhelmed critical systems, a technical failure with massive real-world consequences. Engineers scrambled to restore services, but the chaos lasted long enough to expose a dangerous truth: when a single choke point hiccups, millions pay the price.
This was not a minor blip. Because companies like Cloudflare sit in front of a huge slice of the web, a single failure created a cascade that took down X, ChatGPT, Spotify and dozens of other services that Americans use for work, school, and commerce. The scale of the disruption — and the long list of affected platforms — makes clear that our internet is built on fragile, centralized plumbing that can’t be trusted in a crisis.
Worse yet, this incident came just weeks after a wide-ranging Amazon Web Services outage on October 20, 2025, which similarly knocked out apps and services across the economy and reminded everyone that too much of our digital life sits in the hands of a tiny number of companies. Those two failures in rapid succession are not coincidences; they’re a pattern that should worry every American who values freedom, security, and the ability to run businesses without catastrophic single points of failure.
Conservatives should be clear-eyed about what this means: consolidation of critical infrastructure concentrates power and risk, and that concentration can be weaponized by bad actors, hostile regimes, or simply by the inevitable software bug. We should not be naive about the danger that comes when a handful of private firms become gatekeepers for speech, commerce, and essential services — accountability and competition are not optional.
The remedy is straightforward and patriotic: decentralize, enforce real competition, invest in resilient alternatives, and demand transparency and contingency planning from providers who serve as the backbone of our economy. Congress and state regulators must stop acting like cheerleaders for monopolies and start forcing redundancy, portability, and meaningful interoperability so Americans aren’t held hostage by a single vendor’s outage.
If we love liberty and prosperity, we will not shrug this off as “just tech problems.” We will demand reform, build alternatives, and hold leaders — corporate and political alike — accountable for protecting the country’s digital lifelines. Hardworking Americans deserve an internet that serves them without threat of sudden blackout, and it’s time Washington put the public interest ahead of cozy relationships with Big Tech.
