https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/parts-of-the-internet-just-stopped-working/ar-AA1QF8br?ocid=hpmsn&cvid=691c6a8b4ab94461a1d458f02e25ab63&ei=52

For anyone wondering why this (and other similar outages) cause so much disruption, the answer is simple:

Too much consolidation.  Most people know the internet was originally designed to work during a nuclear war, with entire sections being blown up.  So, why does this happen?  

Some of these companies are so big and have so many customers, that a single company outage brings down huge chunks of the internet (technically, the internet itself is fine, but sites drop off).  

If there were 20 companies who provide the same services, an outage like this would be less impactful, but since few control so much of the market, it has a big impact.  

Yes, I had exactly the same problem this morning trying to order groceries.  What a PITA.  Seems to be better now. 

Yep, I got the 6am fire alarm calls, teams, emails this morning … fortunately was resolved relatively quickly.

Technical details on what happened.  The scary thing is it is just a single failure.  A configuration file grew way too large, gets copied out and causes the entire software to shut down.  It isn't a series of failures happening together, just a simple glitch that has a huge impact because of the scale.  

https://blog.cloudflare.com/18-november-2025-outage/

 

Quote

We are sorry for the impact to our customers and to the Internet in general. Given Cloudflare's importance in the Internet ecosystem any outage of any of our systems is unacceptable. That there was a period of time where our network was not able to route traffic is deeply painful to every member of our team. We know we let you down today.

Steady on, mate. It wasn't the end of the world.

1 hour ago, Christopher Low said:

Steady on, mate. It wasn't the end of the world.

That depends on what systems relied on it … Military, Hospital, Water supply, Dow Jones, Power grid (including Nuclear reactors), FBI, IBM, Apple, LabCorp, Paypal, US Dept State, Logistics (aka my world currently), etc. … 

Our single point of dependencies are certainly something to be concerned about … if nothing more than giving bad actors ideas.

20 hours ago, SayAgain said:

That depends on what systems relied on it … Military, Hospital, Water supply, Dow Jones, Power grid (including Nuclear reactors), FBI, IBM, Apple, LabCorp, Paypal, US Dept State, Logistics (aka my world currently), etc. … 

Our single point of dependencies are certainly something to be concerned about … if nothing more than giving bad actors ideas.

The thing that I notice is there's no concept of an offline workaround process for when things go down anymore.  

I was at a popular pharmacy chain to get a routine shot.  I go, and they tell me they can't do anything as the computers are down.  They've got a pharmacist, a needle, the vaccine I need right there, but "the computers are down".  That was just annoying...

The idea of writing something down on a paper notebook and entering it later never entered their mind.  I tried to explain this to the young person and they looked at me like I was insane.

Years ago a major fuel distributor in the northeast US was hacked.  Now, they never lost the ability to pump fuel through the pipes, but their system to keep track of billing was down, so they shut down.  That was a very major disruption and caused gas shortages all over this part of the country.