A massive Cloudflare outage exposed the vulnerability of Web3.
Date: 2025-11-21 Author: Oliver Abernathy Categories: BUSINESS
The Cloudflare outage on November 18th affected numerous crypto platforms, including Blockchain.com, Coinbase, Ledger, BitMEX, Toncoin, Arbiscan, and DefiLlama, disrupting approximately 20% of all internet traffic. Experts note that the incident once again highlights the heavy reliance of Web3 projects on centralized cloud services, DNS, and APIs, making them vulnerable to isolated outages. Similar outages were previously observed in October during the Amazon Web Services outage.
An EthStorage representative told Cointelegraph that decentralization of blockchains through consensus, validators, and smart contracts is important, but not sufficient for full resilience. True reliability requires a rethinking of the entire technology stack, including interfaces and data storage systems. This approach avoids global outages due to the failure of a single component.
Filecoin developers noted that the incident demonstrated how much Web3 application traffic passes through a limited number of centralized networks. "Just one error in one region can disrupt services worldwide," they explained. Dependence on a single cloud provider creates risks to stable data access and undermines the idea of a decentralized internet.
Web3 users were also not indifferent. One humorously noted that even a "censorship-resistant and decentralized" application proved helpless in the face of a Cloudflare outage.
EthStorage experts point out the habit of crypto projects to use Web2 infrastructure for frontend and auxiliary functions out of convenience and habit. Many consider decentralized alternatives more expensive, complex, and less user-friendly. As a result, decentralization is being put off for "the future" rather than becoming a key architectural requirement.
To address this issue, the expert proposes a gradual transition to a decentralized infrastructure. A complete transformation is impossible overnight: it's important to build a strategy for reducing dependence on centralized solutions into the project roadmap, gradually decentralizing data storage, access management, and code execution.
Earlier in August, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin proposed new ways to strengthen the decentralization of the Ethereum ecosystem, emphasizing the importance of a comprehensive approach to network resilience. Incidents with Cloudflare and AWS have once again demonstrated that Web3 requires not only technological solutions at the blockchain level, but also systemic decentralization of the entire infrastructure.
