On June 12, a Cloudflare service outage that impacted thousands of users demonstrated the true vulnerability of its underlying infrastructure. One error caused a “significant outage” of more than two hours that broke login systems, websites, and apps for thousands of businesses, rendering them unable to access tools or serve their customers. Yet, this damage could have been completely avoidable were it not for one company’s dominance over a centralized network.
Centralization is weakening web2 infrastructure as AI becomes a permanent companion for efficiently completing daily tasks and gathering information. Recently, Cloudflare’s harmful practices against AI innovation came to light with the release of its research into Perplexity’s crawling and scraping activities and its insistence on gatekeeping information that should be publicly accessible on the web. These efforts undermine freedom and trust — the foundational principles of the internet’s creation and evolution.
Due to modern blockchain technology, internet users no longer need to helplessly tolerate the technical and ethical shortcomings of Cloudflare and its centralized web infrastructure, with its widespread outages stemming from singular points of failure and its priority of Big Tech’s interests over the broader public’s. Instead, it is time for internet users to embrace decentralized alternatives, which offer better performance in addition to built-in fault tolerance.
Cloudflare is a content delivery network (CDN) that uses a global network of data centers, typically in high-demand regions, to deliver online content faster and more securely than if each user’s device had to connect directly to a single server. It was founded 15 years ago to increase the efficiency and security of internet use. Each data center is owned and operated by Cloudflare, and its services depend on centralized systems controlled by either Cloudflare itself or third-party providers.
While Cloudflare succeeded for years in achieving the initial goals of its 2010 founding, technology has progressed beyond the point at which Cloudflare can offer its customers the industry’s best product and user experience. And fundamentally, with the emergence of web3 and the rise of AI agents, centralization can no longer support the democratization of public information or competition among smaller players. Decentralization of the network can put control back into the hands of the people while offering a faster, more reliable, and less expensive internet experience.
Even when Cloudflare’s services are not impacted by regular outages, users are still commonly frustrated by slow loading times and increased latency — issues that can be caused by increased traffic on origin servers and Cloudflare’s own limitations, such as prioritization limits that disproportionately affect non-enterprise users. Thus, even when Cloudflare is functioning as intended, it does not provide an optimized internet experience to its customers.
New solutions can address the shortcomings of Cloudflare’s outdated infrastructure by establishing decentralized networks of independently run nodes. Distributing these points of presence across the map simultaneously improves delivery speed and mitigates the risk of a system-wide disruption. This network structure lacks a single point of dependency and avoids congestion-related inefficiencies by directing traffic to multiple available nodes. This ensures that no single point controls the flow of traffic, making the network inherently resilient to technical failures, targeted attacks, and simple over-congestion.
Further, these networks equip dynamic routing systems that allow users’ devices to retrieve data from the closest and most available source, as opposed to a fixed central server. This process minimizes the distance and latency of each action, enabling decentralized CDNs to consistently deliver content to their users at the fastest possible speed.
While only Cloudflare can decide who uses its services, decentralized alternatives offer permissionless access that allows everyone to benefit from the network’s enhanced performance as well as contribute bandwidth and storage to run a node and earn tokenized rewards. Decentralization enables node operators to use a hyper-local approach to servicing underserved communities traditionally neglected by traditional CDNs, which typically choose to serve only where they can profit. Decentralized blockchain networks are community-powered, meaning they are inherently designed to operate based on users’ best interests; this also extends to high standards of censorship resistance, where Cloudflare has fallen short.
Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince’s endorsement of selling exclusive internet access to the wealthiest AI companies as a supposed solution — “Content Independence Day” — to a problem those same companies created in the first place directly undermines the internet’s position as a fair and accessible marketplace. While some creators would be compensated for the traffic taken away by AI search engines, prioritizing the highest-paying AI companies will create a monopoly of data that allows only the richest companies to advance, while entrepreneurs, startups, and other innovators are left sifting through the crumbs of what is left.
“Content Independence Day” will violate open internet principles and serve to deter technological innovation through paywalling public resources for only a select few large AI and tech companies to access. It promotes censorship under the guise of fairness and a flashy, misleading name, and its initiatives enable Cloudflare to profit from the public and stifle the very competition that is currently driving the AI evolution.
Additionally, Cloudflare’s history of removing controversial websites — even if reserved for “extreme cases” — represents a slippery slope of censorship stemming from centralized control. Based on the belief that internet infrastructure companies should not act as content gatekeepers, no single entity can dictate who is allowed to publish and access content on a decentralized network. Thus, decentralized alternatives are far more aligned with the principles of a neutral internet than centralized platforms such as Cloudflare.
After years of enduring the shortcomings of Cloudflare’s centralized infrastructure, including widespread outages, a lack of transparency, and a failure to reach rural communities, decentralized CDNs are not just an alternative solution to provide customers with a fast and reliable internet experience that is infinitely scalable and eliminates the need for data centers. It is a critical safeguard in democratizing the online experience. Therefore, it is time for users to act in their best interests by phasing out Cloudflare and centralized CDNs in favor of community-powered decentralized CDNs that offer the highest quality of content distribution for everyone, everywhere.
