When the Internet Breaks - Cloudflare's 2025 Outage

24/11/25 06:00 Filed in: Technology | Business

The recent global internet outage on November 18th, 2025, was a reminder of the fragility of our digital world. When a single configuration error at Cloudflare took down major services like OpenAI, X, Spotify, and thousands of others, it exposed a critical vulnerability in modern infrastructure.

In this episode of the Inspiring Tech Leaders podcast, I look at the root cause of the Cloudflare incident that cascaded into a global catastrophe.

This episode is a must-listen for anyone concerned with digital supply chain risk and systemic failure. I discuss:

💡 The Concentration Risk - Why a failure in one core provider can cause a systemic shock across the global economy, following similar recent incidents at AWS and Microsoft Azure.
💡 Building for Failure – The critical importance of the Principle of Graceful Degradation.
💡 Mandating Out-of-Band Access - Why your internal tools must be independent of the infrastructure they manage to ensure you can fix problems when the main network is down.
💡 Auditing Automation - The need for rigorous pre-deployment testing and blast radius analysis for all automated configuration changes.

The question is no longer if another failure will happen, but whether your organisation will be prepared when it does.

Available on: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube | All major podcast platforms