What the Decentralized Web Is, How It Works, and Why It Matters Now
Halfway through a crisp November day in 2025, large swathes of the internet suddenly blinked out. Users from Kyiv to California found themselves staring at error messages instead of their social feeds, emails, or work apps. The culprit? A massive outage at Cloudflare – a single company whose behind-the-scenes services handle roughly a fifth of global web traffic. When Cloudflare went down on November 18, major platforms from X (formerly Twitter) to OpenAI’s ChatGPT became inaccessible for thousands of people. As engineers scrambled to fix “widespread 500 errors” on Cloudflare’s network, it was hard to miss the broader lesson: today’s internet has critical single points of failure.
It wasn’t the first such incident. Only weeksearlier, an Amazon Web Services glitch had knocked out popular sites like Snapchat and Reddit.
These incidents underscore how much of the web relies on a handful of centralized infrastructure providers. “A service is only as good as the weakest link in the chain… and that weakest link might not reveal itself until it breaks,” The Register dryly noted during the Cloudflare fiasco.