The Internet has never been so fast, so meshed and so dense. Paradoxically, it has never been so fragile. Cloudflare’s 2025 report confirms it, with figures to back it up.
In 2025, Cloudflare recorded more than 180 major disruptions across the global network.
From local outages to crippling national failures, the verdict is clear: the global Internet infrastructure is under strain.
Submarine cables break, sabotaged or accidentally damaged. Here are a few examples you have probably not heard about:
- In Haiti, two fibre optic cuts within two months brought traffic down to zero for several hours.
- Power grids fail (the Dominican Republic lost 50% of its traffic in November after a line failure).
- Regional interconnections give way: an incident between Kenya and Uganda cut Kenyan traffic by 18% in December.
- And in Ukraine, Russian drone strikes on Odesa caused a 57% loss of local traffic, for days on end.
What does this show? That physical infrastructure is increasingly exposed to geopolitical and climate shocks.
And on top of that, there is software fragility.
The biggest disruptions of 2025 were not caused by cut cables or storms, but by configuration errors at major service operators.
The October 2025 AWS incident (us-east-1 region) is perhaps the most striking of the year. And Cloudflare itself was not spared: on 18 November, a change to database permissions corrupted an entire service; on 5 December, another outage affected nearly 28% of the HTTP traffic it serves.
What all these incidents have in common: concentration.
When a single player handles a massive share of global traffic, the slightest configuration error can affect the entire global Internet.
Therein lies the irony: ARPANET, the forerunner of the Internet, was designed in the 1960s with a single goal, decentralisation.
If a node goes down, traffic automatically reroutes along another path. A network able to survive any attack, including a nuclear one.
Decade after decade, the concentration of services towards a few Cloud giants has produced the exact opposite of this logic. We have built a faster, more powerful Internet, but one that is structurally more vulnerable.
2025 should be seen as a wake-up call: neither power nor speed protects against structural fragility.
What protects is the diversification of paths, the neutrality of nodes and the resilience of local interconnection. That is exactly what France-IX is building.
Why peer?
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