The dangerous widespread outrage of our contemporary, hyper-connected internet was recently brought home by a series of significant outages that affected Cloudflare, ChatGPT, and Amazon Web Services (AWS). Everything from consumer-facing social media and gaming platforms like Fortnite and Snapchat to enterprise tools and artificial intelligence services like ChatGPT is brought down by the cascading effects of the underlying digital infrastructure collapsing.
The incidents are a gritty reminder that despite years of so-called investments in cloud resiliency, the vast majority of the internet is developed around only a handful of foundational cloud regions, which presents a critical “concentration risk” that turns a single technical error into a digital blackout thousands of miles apart.
A case in point, one of the major AWS outage incidents in the critical US-EAST-1 region also resulted in widespread disruptions across 3,500+ companies in over 60 countries. The issue is not only a technical issue, but is an architectural dependency on a handful of major suppliers.
Cloud Concentration and Systemic Risk
The reliance on a single, dominant cloud provider or region is the primary magnifier of these cascading failures. The October 2025 AWS outage, originating in the massive US-EAST-1 (Northern Virginia) region, saw Amazon’s own services including Alexa and Prime Video fail alongside customer platforms.
This particular region has become a repeated single point of failure, experiencing at least four such major disruptions since 2020. This systemic risk is compounded by the fact that many platforms, including AI startups like Perplexity, build their entire architecture on a single cloud, exposing their distributed systems to total failure when the provider’s core service breaks.
Mitigating Interdependency: The Cloudflare and ChatGPT Lesson
While the AWS event demonstrated a major cloud provider’s internal failure, other recent outages show how interdependency creates secondary vulnerability. For instance, a Cloudflare disruption in August 2025, which affected connections to AWS US-EAST-1, was triggered not by an attack, but by a massive surge of legitimate traffic from a single customer hosted within that AWS region, overwhelming the interconnecting links.
Similarly, a separate ChatGPT outage earlier in the year was traced to a control plane service for one of its clusters experiencing memory exhaustion. In both cases, the core lesson is that resilience must be an active, multi-layer strategy.
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A recent media graduate, Bhumi Vashisht is currently making a significant contribution as a committed content writer. She brings new ideas to the media sector and is an expert at creating strategic content and captivating tales, having working in the field from past four months.
