- The Internet’s original design emphasized decentralization and robustness.
- Consolidation has shifted us toward an ecosystem where a handful of companies underpin much of the global digital economy.
- Recent outages demonstrate the risks of this model with increasing clarity.
On 18 November 2025, a major Cloudflare outage disrupted access to numerous websites and online services. What should have been a contained technical fault escalated into a global incident, affecting users far beyond Cloudflare’s direct customer base.
As Cloudflare described in its prompt post-incident analysis, a permission issue in the database system cascaded into failures globally.
This incident reinforces a trend that the Internet Society has been closely tracking: the Internet is becoming increasingly dependent on a very small number of infrastructure providers. And when one of them sneezes, the entire Internet catches a cold.
Our Pulse Internet Concentration tracker shows that since June 2021, the concentration level of the Content Delivery Network (CDN) market has increased steadily, from 2,448 to 3,410, for the top 10,000 most visited websites globally, as measured by the Herfindahl-Hirschman Index (HHI). Anything above 2,500 signifies “High concentration” of the market.
Latest Outage Follows Similar Episodes This Year
In May, the Cloudflare 1.1.1.1 DNS outage highlighted the fragility of DNS dependencies — a topic I explored in a Pulse blog reflecting on lessons for resilience. Only a few weeks later, a large AWS outage disrupted streaming platforms, payments, airline websites, and even parts of the global logistics. A single configuration error in one AWS region triggered failures across the global digital economy.
Then on 29 October, a DNS issue in Azure Front Door brought down the Azure Portal, Microsoft 365 services, Outlook, and Xbox multiplayer functionality. Once again, a seemingly isolated failure at one provider cascaded across millions of users.
These incidents are not random. They reflect a deeper, structural issue: Internet consolidation has reached a point where the failure of a single provider can destabilize significant parts of the global Web.
Is the Internet Truly Decentralized?
The Internet’s architecture was built on the principle of decentralization. Yet today, a small number of companies provide much of the infrastructure that keeps the modern Web running — DNS, cloud computing, hosting, content delivery, and certificate management.
The Internet Society’s 2019 Global Internet Report on Consolidation in the Internet Economy warned that this growing concentration could create systemic risks. A series of recent measurement studies also confirmed consolidation trends empirically.
In a 2021 paper, Phong et al. quantified the dependence of popular websites on a handful of DNS and hosting providers. Unsurprisingly, they found that Cloudflare and Amazon alone host over 30% of popular domains for both DNS and web hosting. When you add Google, Akamai, and Fastly, five providers host 60% of index pages in the Tranco Top-10K.
These trends are consistently observed across various vantage points worldwide. In other words, despite an ever-expanding number of websites, much of the Internet still relies on a small set of companies to resolve names and serve content.
Another important study conducted by Kashaf et al. in 2020 discovered that 89% of Alexa Top-100K websites are critically dependent on at least one third-party DNS, CDN, or Certificate Authority. The top-three providers in each category can directly or indirectly impact 50–70% of all sites, and indirect dependencies amplify the reach of large providers by up to 25 times. This means even websites that believe they are “independent” or “multi-homed” often rely on the same upstream giants due to multiple dependencies across websites.
As part of our Popular Content locality measurement, Pulse also provides some indication about consolidation in the hosting market. We used the top 1,000 websites from Google CRUX, and using FindCDN, we extracted the underlying hosting/CDN provider. See the widget below to get an idea of the most prominent content hosting provider by country.
Why is Consolidation Bad for the Internet?
When one provider has a large share of DNS or content delivery traffic, an outage does not just affect its customers — it affects everyone downstream. This is why outages by large providers can potentially impact multiple sectors, including finance, healthcare, logistics, and e-government services.
Many large providers combine DNS, CDN, DDoS protection, edge hosting, analytics, and security into a single integrated stack. While this may be convenient and efficient, it breaks a critical resilience principle, which is the “separation of concerns”. A configuration mistake in a provider’s DNS subsystem can propagate to caching, routing, and even application delivery — turning what would once have been a small issue into a global outage.
Additionally, organizations often do not necessarily understand their full dependency map. A website might use a CDN for performance, a DNS provider for resolution, a CA for certificates, and a cloud provider for hosting — and many of these services might themselves depend on the same upstream infrastructure. This opacity renders the ecosystem brittle and prone to failure at scale.
That said, we should not abandon CDNs or cloud platforms; they provide enormous performance, security, and operational benefits. Many operators invest quite heavily to make their infrastructure highly available, performant, and resilient. Yet, major outages can still happen, and we need to build an Internet where no single provider can take down half the Web.
Some Practical Steps to Increase Internet Resilience
Websites increasingly depend on CDNs for speed and protection, but they should not go offline if a CDN cache becomes unreachable. We need robust failover mechanisms that allow clients to access origin servers directly when needed. Reducing reliance on opaque, tightly coupled CDN behavior is essential for resilience. This is particularly crucial for governments, financial institutions, and organizations running essential digital services. One can adopt a multi-CDN architecture, a multi-provider DNS setup, and redundant hosting across independent platforms.
At the Internet Society, we believe in the power of localized infrastructure and local community. Having a diversity of service providers, including local and regional cloud/DNS/CDNs providers, will strengthen Internet resilience.
To build a more resilient, secure, and equitable Internet, we must diversify infrastructure, strengthen the separation of concerns, and invest in localized alternatives. A balanced Internet — where no single company can bring the world to a halt — is essential not only for uptime, but for privacy, competition, and national security.
Internet Society Pulse will continue to track consolidation trends, quantify dependencies, and provide data-driven insights to support policymakers, researchers, and advocates working toward a healthier, more resilient Internet.