Severe internet outages keep happening — and they might get worse

It’s not just you — internet outages severe enough to disrupt everyday services for many people have become more frequent and wide-ranging, experts say

It’s not just you — internet outages severe enough to disrupt everyday services for many people have become more frequent and wide-ranging, experts say.

When internet services company Cloudflare crashed Tuesday — prompting significant, hourslong disruptions at companies ranging from X to OpenAI to Discord — it was the third major internet outage in the space of about a month.

While there’s plenty of finger-pointing to go around, two things are clear: Popular consumer businesses increasingly rely on a handful of giant companies that run things more cheaply in the cloud, and when one of those companies isn’t extraordinarily careful, an obscure software vulnerability or tiny mistake can reverberate through to many of their customers, making it seem like half the internet has been unplugged.

“This spate of outages has been uniquely terrible,” said Erie Meyer, the former chief technical officer of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau under the Biden administration. “It’s like what we were told Y2K would be like, and it’s happening more often.”

It’s become a common enough occurrence that jokes about the failures, rooted in an understanding of the basics of internet infrastructure, have become popular memes in the computer science world.