It’s not just you: The internet is breaking

Quartz | Shannon Carroll

Sat, November 22, 2025 at 5:30 AM GMT+11

Smith Collection/Gado/Getty Images

In the span of a few months this year, the internet has managed to knock itself sideways four different ways. And the official explanations have landed with all the romance of a maintenance log. A Cloudflare file exceeded its expected size. A DNS entry inside AWS pointed nowhere. An Azure configuration change went sideways. A Google service-control rule looped into failure and sent itself into repeated crash cycles.

Each failure began as a routine maintenance task — the digital equivalents of leaving a door ajar. Each one expanded into a global interruption.

These events slid into place quietly and revealed the same uncomfortable truth: The internet is a tightly bound structure, not a sprawling, distributed network, as many people may imagine. A small change in one corner sets off a chain reaction in another because so many digital services rely on the same gateways, the same load balancers, the same identity checkpoints, and the same routing layers. The fragility sits inside those shared pathways, not inside the individual apps that blinked out of view.

So, no, you’re not wrong: The internet feels like it’s breaking — because we’ve made it too big to fail and too small at the top to stay upright.

Tiny fixes become global problems

When a file grew beyond its expected size inside Cloudflare earlier this week, the fallout traveled far beyond the sites that actually run on Cloudflare. Banks saw degraded performance. Retail checkouts lagged. Messaging platforms stalled. Even the supposedly “smart” gear people trust to run the morning — the coffee maker that depends on a cloud handshake, the thermostat that insists on verifying itself, the app that decides whether the commute is survivable — stuttered as the edge layer fell out of step.

Cloudflare’s leadership didn’t bother with spin. The company’s chief technology officer tweeted an apology that acknowledged “failing the broader internet” and pinned the blame on a latent bug triggered by a routine configuration change. No breach, no sinister actor — just an everyday tweak that managed to trip a network the size of a continent.

The company fronts roughly a fifth of global web traffic, which means a permissions shift inside one database brushed against millions of sessions with a single deployment. Businesses treat that edge network as plumbing. Insurers treat it as systemic exposure. The Global 2000 now loses an estimated $400 billion a year to cloud and edge downtime, and the largest enterprises regularly peg interruption costs in the $1-million to $5-million-per-hour range. A file buried deep inside a system most people have never heard of still managed to bend the digital world to its will.

A missing DNS field inside AWS’s busiest region produced another kind of tilt late last month. Traffic slid into fallback modes. Some services froze altogether. Insurers modeled up to $581 million in potential claims, a figure that doesn’t even capture abandoned carts, payroll delays, or stalled shipments that never reach the paperwork stage.

More than 17 million user-reported failures stacked up in the first hours. That number was large enough to show how dependent companies remain on AWS’ core regions — even when architects insist they have spread their risk. Region redundancy offered little insulation because identity checks, data calls, and background tasks still funnel through the most popular region by habit. The failure didn’t last long, but it still reached sectors that thought they stood outside the impact zone. Welcome to the modern cloud.

Azure’s turn arrived the following week when a traffic-management update in a Microsoft edge layer slowed down workplace logins, airline check-ins, retail portals, and gaming platforms. The surface symptoms looked disconnected. The underlying problem sat in a routing system tied to Microsoft’s identity stack. Many organizations that don’t run their applications on Azure still rely on Microsoft to verify credentials, authorize sessions, or route user data. A shift in that layer appears small on paper. But in practice, it affects travel, commerce, communication, and office workflows — all at the same time.

A service-control rule slipped into the wrong layer inside Google Cloud over the summer and knocked the platform off balance. The code that signs off on routine API calls kept crashing and restarting, and requests that usually clear in a blink began to stall or fall away. The stutter showed up across regions as authentication failures, halted builds, and applications blinking in and out of view — hitting streaming platforms, collaboration tools, and Google’s own systems before the platform managed to steady itself. It didn’t last long, but it made plain that Google’s control plane behaves like a single surface, and a small shift in that layer follows every path that depends on it.

One web, one spine

These failures didn’t come from the same flaw. But they pointed to the same structure.

The internet grew around a handful of infrastructure providers that now operate as load-bearing beams for the global economy. Amazon, Microsoft, and Google control roughly 62% of the world’s cloud-infrastructure spending. Cloudflare sits in front of 20% of the web, and more than 80% of sites that use reverse proxies depend on that as their single provider. Identity platforms from Microsoft, Amazon, and Okta sit behind hundreds of millions of logins a day.

The internet used to look like a mycelium network: messy, redundant, and distributed. Increasingly, it looks like a handful of glass-and-steel server farms and security gateways, where a mid-sized file in San Francisco or an empty DNS record in Virginia can briefly tilt the entire digital economy off its axis.

Companies still talk about diversity of infrastructure. They reference multicloud setups and region failover strategies. These outages showed how thin those strategies become once shared dependency chains come into view. A retailer that spreads its compute across clouds still stumbles when its checkout flow depends on a CDN that has gone dark. A hospital that keeps its patient records in on-premise systems still deals with delays if its messaging or imaging integrations run through a cloud service tied to the wrong routing layer. An airline that invests heavily in its own data centers still sees a slowdown when its identity checks pass through an authentication provider experiencing trouble.

None of these organizations planned particularly poorly. The issue sits in the modern stack itself. Too many critical functions rely on layers that live outside a company’s control.

Analysts who study outages pay less attention to duration and more attention to blast radius. The AWS incident spread to more than 3,500 companies across 60-plus countries. Cloudflare’s failure generated more than 11,000 user-incident reports and tripped up workflows inside banks, retailers, logistics systems, media platforms, and government agencies — all of which assumed their “edge” layer lived far enough from the edge of anything. Azure’s slowdown drew more than 30,000 outage reports in the first hour and produced disruptions across travel, entertainment, and half the digital ways people procrastinate. Google’s stumble sent more than 10,000 cloud-level reports and sent glitches through streaming platforms, collaboration tools, and the services that lean on its cloud. Each incident revealed how concentrated the foundations of the internet have become. A setback inside one provider moves across sectors because the same networks, the same content-delivery systems, and the same identity services show up beneath most digital products.

The internet’s fabric is fragile

The scale of the outages had less to do with time and everything to do with what set them off. Small, almost forgettable changes — a configuration file growing past its limit, a DNS pointer vanishing, a routing rule drifting, a service-control check spinning into failure — ended up pulling whole systems sideways. Small cause, large effect. None of those moves reads like a trigger for multimillion-dollar losses or frozen global workflows, but in a system this consolidated, that’s where the impact landed. The real risk no longer lives inside individual services or data centers. It lives inside the connective tissue that everyone leans on without thinking.

Cloud providers and traffic networks still promote redundancy, and the engineering behind those claims is real. The issue sits in the gaps, those strategies can’t reach. Redundancy inside one provider protects the workloads that stay inside that provider’s walls. It offers no shield against shared DNS layers, shared edge networks, or shared identity stacks. As long as those layers remain concentrated around a small number of companies, a routine adjustment can push companies across different industries into a parallel slowdown.

This fall’s disruptions didn’t suggest a failing internet; they offered a better picture of the one that exists.

The web behaves more like a single, interconnected engine than most people realize. Businesses and public-sector institutions now operate inside that engine, whether they intend to or not. The next failure may come from a setting change, a shift in a routing table, or a file that crosses a threshold. The internet hasn’t fallen apart (yet). But it has just shown how easily it could.

Biodiesel From Date-seeds Powers Bus Transport Initiative

Oman Observer | Business Economy: Date-seeds powers bus transport initiative

Oman's significant consumption of dates led to a surplus of waste generated from the seeds. Traditionally used for coffee, an innovative idea sparked a determined seven-year research and development process, resulting in successful biodiesel production from date kernels.

Dates Kernel Biodiesel Research

The biofuel revolution in Oman stands as a shining example of innovation, collaboration, and perseverance in the face of daunting challenges. Dr. Al Haj's pioneering work exemplifies the transformative power of research and development in addressing pressing environmental issues and shaping a more sustainable and prosperous future for generations to come.

A Mwasalat bus in Oman is powered entirely by biodiesel derived from waste date Kernels.

Jomar Mendoza for Oman Observer | Business Economy | MUSCAT, MAY 13

A groundbreaking initiative is revolutionizing the way people think about energy production and waste management. Dr. Lamya al-Haj, an Associate Professor at the College of Science at Sultan Qaboos University, has spearheaded a remarkable project to transform waste date seeds into biodiesel, paving the way for a more sustainable future for the Middle East region.

Gaining traction, the World Economic Forum (WEF) recently featured a video of Dr. Al Haj’s work. In the featured video, the journey toward biofuel production from date kernels began in 2015 when Dr. Al Haj and her team recognized the vast potential of utilizing the oil content in date seeds to create biodiesel.

With Oman being a significant consumer of dates, there was an abundance of waste generated from the seeds, which were traditionally used for coffee. This innovative idea sparked a seven-year-long research and development process, culminating in successful biodiesel production from date kernels.

"The date seeds were used for coffee as coffee beans. We thought, can we utilize the oil content in the seeds to convert that into biodiesel because it has about 9 to 15% of oil in the seeds? And that's what sparked the idea in the very beginning," Dr. Al Haj explained.

The first tangible outcome of this groundbreaking research was the launch of a Mwasalat bus in Oman powered entirely by biodiesel derived from waste date kernels. This achievement marked a significant milestone, showcasing the potential for renewable energy solutions to replace traditional fossil fuels in the transportation sector.

"For me, it was a personal achievement because I wanted to drive home the point that research can go from the lab to the road, and it's a very strong message to send to our youth, to our students, to our society, that research should be focused on real problems in our countries and the world," Dr. Al Haj expressed.

Beyond the environmental benefits of reducing waste and carbon emissions, the biofuel production project in Oman carries wide-ranging social and economic implications. By creating a demand for date kernels as a raw material for biodiesel production, the project has the potential to generate new sources of income for farmers and create job opportunities in the agricultural sector.

"So this is going to create jobs for the farmers because instead of them throwing the seeds on in the farming industry, now they're going to be part of the solution for the collection," Dr Al Haj highlighted.

The biofuel revolution in Oman stands as a shining example of innovation, collaboration, and perseverance in the face of daunting challenges. Dr Al Haj's pioneering work exemplifies the transformative power of research and development in addressing pressing environmental issues and shaping a more sustainable and prosperous future for generations to come.

Banking, Real Estate & Technology, Headquartered in Rwanda

Mara Group & Mara Foundation

Africa Reach – An African company with investments and operations in 25 countries across the continent

By Theo Edwards

Made in Africa

The first high specification, affordable smartphone manufactured in Africa, Mara Phones is committed to enhancing and enriching the lives of the people of Africa. Manufacturing in Africa enables job creation and also making the smartphone more affordable to all, contributing to business and development on the continent. Manufactured in Africa, ready for the global market!

Established in 1996, Mara has grown from a small computer hardware trading firm in East Africa to a multi-sector group with investments and operations spanning 25 African countries and 3 continents.

Why Africa? “The Lion Awakes: Adventures in Africa’s Economic Miracle” by Ashish J. Thakkar is the true story of today’s Africa, one often overshadowed by the dire headlines. Traveling from his ancestral home in Uganda, East Africa, to the booming economy and (if chaotic) new democracies of West Africa, and down to the “Silicon Savannahs” of Kenya and Rwanda, Ashish J. Thakkar shows us an Africa that few Westerners are aware exists.

Mara’s technology ventures capitalizes on the rapidly growing smartphone and internet markets creating a suite of platforms that are tailored locally.

“The rise of the African Middle Class is expected to fuel consumption growth. This will provide a considerable opportunity to invest and meet the burgeoning demand. McKinsey projects that, by the year 2030, the top 18 cities in sub-Saharan Africa will have a combined spending power of $1.3 trillion. Africa’s retail banking sector is projected to grow 40 percent by 2020” ~The Realities of Africa. Learn More.

The Future of Wearables

Providing invaluable insights into the habits and preferences are perhaps the most personal tech device we own – Smart devices. Growing access to these devices such as smartphones and smartwatches enables people to be online virtually anywhere, and at any time exploring endless entertainment among other things of digital distribution and creative opportunities.

Last November, Apple announced it would partner with researchers from Stanford University to run the Apple Heart Study to investigate Atrial Fibrillation (afib) a type of heart rhythm disorder. Normal heartbeat, contracts and relaxes to a regular beat, so our body gets oxygen and food it needs. Certain cells in our heart make electric signals that cause the heart to contract and pump blood. These electrical signals show up on an electrocardiogram (ECG) recording. In afib, the heart’s two small upper chambers the atria don’t beat the way they should instead the atria beat irregularly and too fast.

VIDEO IMAGE: SEPTEMBER 12, 2018: ET Panache

Today at a special event at Apple’s headquarters, Apple’s COO Jeff Williams unveiled the next generation Apple Watch with ECG app and fall detection sensor. Say hello to the future of wearables. The new Apple Watch Series 4 Heart Monitor now basically is our 24*7*365 wrist doctor capable of measuring and recording our heart's electrical activity in wavelengths. It monitors heart rate using green LED lights embedded in the device, and all the health data is encrypted on the device and in the cloud, Williams said.

So why an Apple Watch with EKG? ECG on smartwatch detects afib accurately according to research. Although one may detect an abnormal heart rhythm by checking the pulse or listening to the heart, the only way to confirm an atrial fibrillation diagnosis is to get an electrocardiogram (EKG or ECG). Newly designed wristband and corresponding app that works with a smartwatch accurately display the heart's electrical activity and notify people with afib if their heart is beating normally or not, according to new data. Meaning the watch can be used as a medical device, The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) cleared the EKG feature. For Apple, EKG feature is serious business and the next step as a health company. The EKG feature of the Watch itself will pave the way for medical clearance of even more Apple features.