Opinion Piece: The pitfall of centralized servers

For a few hours in November 2025, the internet reminded everyone how fragile it really is.

X stopped loading. ChatGPT returned errors. Discord went quiet. Shopify checkouts stalled. Internal business tools failed. The most hilarious thing? Even outage trackers struggled to stay online. Around the same time, one of the largest crypto exchanges, KuCoin’s users found its users locked out of their accounts, unable to trade, withdraw, or even see balances. Support channels filled up instantly. 

Not due to a cyberattack, censorship in one of the hard states, or the Iran-Israel war. Because one centralized infrastructure provider had some bugs.

That is not a freak event. That is how the modern internet is built.

The internet is often described as decentralized. In practice, much of it runs through a surprisingly small number of choke points. Cloudflare. AWS. Azure. Google Cloud. A few companies handle DNS resolution, traffic routing, DDoS protection, authentication, and API access for millions of services.

When everything works, nobody notices. When something breaks, everyone does.

In November 2025, a global Cloudflare outage disrupted a massive portion of the web. X, OpenAI services, Discord, Spotify, Canva, Shopify, gaming platforms, crypto frontends, and countless smaller sites experienced partial or total failure. The cause was not malicious. It was a configuration error inside Cloudflare’s own systems. One change. One layer. Global impact.

Less than three weeks later, another Cloudflare outage in December 2025 caused a similar disruption. Zoom, LinkedIn, X, and business-critical services were affected again. Some airport systems and enterprise tools relying on Cloudflare-backed infrastructure reported downtime. The same pattern repeated. A centralized dependency failed, and the web folded around it.

Cloudflare handles roughly one-fifth of global internet traffic. That number alone should make anyone uncomfortable. But Cloudflare is not unique.

AWS outages earlier in 2025 broke login systems, APIs, and databases for thousands of applications at once. Azure has had regional failures that knocked out productivity tools, authentication services, and internal systems across entire continents. These incidents rarely make philosophical headlines. They should. Because they expose a structural problem, not a temporary bug.

The argument for centralized cloud infrastructure is simple. It is efficient. It is fast to deploy. It is cheap at scale. It offers reliability that most individual teams cannot replicate on their own. While all of that is true, the problem arises when efficiency becomes dependency.

Most services today do not just rely solely on centralized infrastructure; they assume it will always be there. DNS resolution, traffic routing, security filtering, and identity layers are often delegated entirely to a third party. When that third party fails, there remains just an absence, no graceful degradation, no fallback, just an absence.

This creates a quiet but dangerous inversion. Instead of many independent systems failing independently, we now have one failure mode that cascades everywhere at once. That is not resilience. That is systemic risk.

Outages are usually framed as an inconvenience. A few hours offline. Some angry users. A postmortem blog post. Then everyone moves on. 

But the deeper issue is control.

If a single provider can accidentally take down a large portion of global communication, commerce, and coordination, that same provider can also become a point of pressure. Even without malicious intent. Even without censorship. The architecture itself creates leverage.

A free internet cannot rely on structures where a small number of companies sit between users and access. Not because those companies are evil. But because concentration, by definition, creates power.

The late-2025 outages showed something clearly. The internet never fails at the edges anymore. It fails at the core. This problem is not limited to websites and APIs. It mirrors what happened in finance.

TradeFi centralized its infrastructure because it was efficient. Clearinghouses. Custodians. Payment rails. A few systems became “too important to fail.” When they failed, governments stepped in. When they worked, they quietly accumulated influence.

Crypto was supposed to break that pattern. Instead, much of crypto rebuilt it. Different tools. Same structure. Centralized exchanges. Custodial wallets. Cloud-hosted validators. Token-weighted governance controlled by a small number of large holders.

And just like the internet, when one centralized piece breaks, the ripple spreads.

Many projects call themselves decentralized because they use blockchains. But if the frontend is hosted behind Cloudflare, the APIs run on AWS, the validators sit in a few cloud regions, and governance depends on token concentration, the decentralization is shallow. It exists on paper instead of being practiced.

True decentralization has to reach the base layer. The part that decides who participates. Who validates. Who governs. Who gets shut out when systems are stressed?

This is where Humanode fits into the conversation, not as a solution to cloud outages, but as a different architectural philosophy against centralization.

Humanode is built around a simple inversion. The unit of power is not servers or capital, or infrastructure budgets. It is humans.

Through Proof of Biometric Uniqueness, Humanode ensures that each validator represents a single, real, living human. One human. One node. One vote. Not one cloud instance or one wallet with a large balance.

This matters because it makes capture harder at the base layer. You cannot scale influence by spinning up servers. You cannot buy control by renting more infrastructure. You have to convince humans to participate.

Governance follows the same logic through Humanode Vortex, Humanode’s governance system. Decisions are population-based, not balance-based. Influence is earned socially, not purchased economically.

Now we don’t say that this magically solves cloud outages. But it addresses the same root issue: concentration of control and power.

If the internet is to remain free, and if financial systems are to stay credible, decentralization cannot stop at branding or tooling. It has to shape who holds power when things break.

The late-2025 Cloudflare outages were warnings. They showed what happens when convenience becomes dependency, when efficiency replaces resilience. When too much trust is placed in a small number of centralized layers.

The solution is not to abandon infrastructure providers. The solution is to design systems that do not collapse when one layer fails. Systems that distribute responsibility, assume failure, and survive it.

A free internet is not one where nothing ever goes wrong. It is one where no single failure can silence everyone at once. That is the bar. And it is still very far away.