On 18th November, a configuration change in a Cloudflare database resulted in widespread unavailability of websites and web-based services. Benjamin Schilz says that this is yet another wake-up call for organizations to review their digital resilience.
Benjamin Schilz is CEO of Wire, a digital workspace platform that specialises in secure collaboration. Commenting, he stated:
“The recent Cloudflare outage, occurring only a few weeks after the last major cloud disruption, shows how brittle our digital reliance has become. Big cloud outages aren’t new, similar large-scale incidents occurred in 2017 and 2021, and regional outages occur regularly, and they will certainly happen again.
“The problem is systemic: the three main hyper-scalers (AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure) provide roughly two-thirds of the underlying infrastructure the digital world runs on. Their APIs connect everything from banking systems and smart homes to e-commerce, meaning the operational error of just one instantly creates a massive single point of failure.
“This high-dependency, predominantly on US-based providers with virtually no real non-US alternatives offering comparable scale, forces us to fundamentally rethink dependencies and access risk within our internal tech stacks.
“The crucial lesson is that resilience, diversity, and redundancy must always be weighed against convenience when building and deploying digital services. True resilience isn’t just about preparing for redundancy; it’s about maintaining control over your own data. That means ensuring that organizations can continue to operate securely and independently, without being tied to one platform, by having robust fallback and alternative solutions in place.”
