Cloudflare Outage Exposes Web3’s Centralization Problem

A significant Cloudflare service disruption on November 18, 2025, caused by a database permissions change, led to widespread HTTP 5xx errors, taking down major crypto exchanges and DeFi protocols. This incident starkly exposed the contradiction between the crypto industry's claims of decentralization and its operational reliance on centralized Web2 infrastructure like Cloudflare, which serves over 10% of all websites. Industry analysts criticized this dependency, noting that while blockchains are decentralized, user access points are vulnerable. However, some experts, like Helius Labs' CEO Mert, contextualized the event by noting Cloudflare's massive scale compared to blockchain throughput, suggesting the engineering challenge for fully decentralized, high-capacity alternatives remains. The outage is expected to spur innovation in building more resilient, decentralized infrastructure solutions for Web3.

(Source：BeInCrypto)