Another day, another internet blackout. This time, a company you may not have heard of, called Cloudflare, ran into serious trouble. Because of a mysterious traffic spike, popular sites like Shopify, ChatGPT, and even the transit authority in New Jersey found their digital doors locked for millions of users.
It’s a familiar feeling. Last month, it was Amazon’s web services that went down. Before that, a mistake from the cybersecurity company CrowdStrike caused chaos at airports and hospitals. It feels like we’re living through a series of digital power failures.
But what’s really happening? Sites like Shopify and the New Jersey Transit Authority shouldn’t share anything, but they are often run on the same computers, and connected to the same networks. The problem is that much of the internet is built like a town with only one main street. When a water main breaks on that one street, every shop and home goes thirsty.
A handful of giant companies have become the landlords for our digital world. They provide the power and plumbing for everything from your favorite online store to your email. This makes things convenient, but it also creates a single point of failure. When one of these tech landlords has a bad day, the rest of us are left in the dark.
This isn’t just about a temporary inconvenience. It’s about the risk of putting all our eggs in one basket. Our ability to work, to communicate, and to access vital services is now tied to the health of a few massive corporations. Their systems are complex, and as we’ve seen, they are not unbreakable.
There is a better way.
We need to start building an internet that looks less like a single main street and more like a web of interconnected country roads. This concept is called decentralization. It means spreading out the responsibility and the power so that no single company can cause a global crisis.
Imagine if your town’s power didn’t come from one distant plant, but from a mix of local solar panels and wind turbines. If one source had a problem, the others could pick up the slack. The same idea can work for the internet. By supporting smaller, independent tech providers and technologies that are not controlled by one entity, we can create a more resilient digital world.
The recent outages are more than just glitches. They are a warning. They show us that our current path is fragile. It is time for us to demand more choices and to support a vision of the internet that is built for reliability, not just for corporate convenience.
Our digital future should be in many hands, not just a few.
Hero image HaeB, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
