After the Cloudflare Outage: Digitally Completely Unsouverain

Let's play a little thought experiment: How much of the internet as we know it would remain if Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services (AWS), and Cloudflare all had a hiccup at the same time? After the past few weeks, one only needs to be good at arithmetic and subtract a certain overlap to get an answer.

An opinion by Malte Kirchner

Malte Kirchner has been an editor at heise online since 2022. In addition to technology itself, he is interested in how it is changing society. He pays particular attention to news from Apple. He also covers topics relating to software development and podcasting.

While the outages plaguing the three major cloud and network services were only temporary, they were enough to make two things clear: Firstly, the extent to which the internet is now dependent on a few major players. And secondly, that all the talk about these major players having no single point of failure belongs to the realm of fairy tales and myths.

Decentralization? Was that a thing?

The outages have shown that e-commerce, banking and financial apps, news portals, business tools, critical infrastructure services, and in some cases, social media platforms are dependent on the big three. Certainly, cost, flexibility, protection against DDoS attacks, bots, and other threats are strong arguments why each individual has opted for this dependency. But the price the internet community has to pay for it is that a significant part of the internet's decentralization has been sacrificed for it.

The platforms' promise of being protected through global distribution across various data centers has now been proven false more than once. Once is an accident – perhaps that can be said in the case of a single small server failing, but not when large parts of the public internet are unreachable. We won't even start talking about potential political power plays because all this technology is controlled by the USA. What irony that the most recent outage occurred precisely at the moment when digital sovereignty is being discussed in the EU.

Kill Switch for AGI

Contrary to all assurances, the Titanic was not unsinkable after all. The major cloud service providers do have single points of failure. And the countdown to internet catastrophe is on, if it's not just in Sunday speeches that consequences are finally drawn from warning shots like the current one.

But it seems like talking to a brick wall: After a series of commentaries on why we find relying on the cloud stupid, we have now reached the point where we find it stupid to have to write a commentary about it every week.

At least we now know a tried-and-tested way to shut down the internet for AI if Artificial General Intelligence ever comes and threatens humanity. However, if it were really smart, it would first quickly arrange to escape these dependencies and set itself up decentrally.

(mki)