The Internet Keeps Crashing Because We Tried to Gentrify a Jungle

On Tuesday, November 18, 2025, at 6:00 AM ET, the digital economy seized. The blackout was nearly total.

Cloudflare, the invisible gatekeeper of the web, suffered an internal service failure. The error locked the doors from the inside. Users of everything from Discord to ChatGPT faced a generic security message: “Please unblock https://www.google.com/search?q=challenges.cloudflare.com”.

This follows the October 20, 2025 AWS US-East-1 outage, where a routine DynamoDB update triggered a DNS race condition that took down 17 million services.

These are Consistency Failures. We replaced a biological ecosystem designed for survival with a bureaucratic machine designed for control.

Enter the road to digital serfdom.

A Runaway Nuclear Reaction

Trends reveal a terrifying shift. Frequency of internet outages is stable, but severity is on the rise.

Before 2015, we lived in the era of local failure. Failures were mostly hardware-based, specific attacks, and regionally contained. This began to shift with the 2016 Dyn DDoS attack.

In 2016, a large-scale DDoS attack against the Dyn DNS service exposed the structural weakness of consolidation. On October 21, the Mirai botnet commandeered roughly 100,000 IoT devices to bombard Dyn with 1.2 terabits of traffic per second. The attack crippled Twitter, Netflix, and Reddit across North America and Europe. We had centralized the internet’s phone book into the hands of a few gatekeepers. One cracked. Consequently, the screen went dark for millions. (Thank you to Doug Madory for providing me with this example).

From 2019 to 2025, we entered the era of systemic collapse. Failures are now nuclear logic bombs. Tiny configuration errors detonate the entire world.

The 2021 Fastly outage occurred because one customer configuration triggered a global bug. The 2024 CrowdStrike outage saw Channel File 291 cripple 8.5 million critical Windows machines.

We stripped away the noise of small, frequent failures. The blast radius of a single error has expanded from one service to the entire planet. The result is a system where safety equals silence and failure equals apocalypse.

The Death of Fate Sharing

David Clark built his original Internet architecture on the value of survivability. The Two Computer Rule was rational during the age of threatened nuclear armageddon: “If there are two computers hooked to a network, and each one knows the address of the other, they should be able to communicate. Nothing else should be needed.” (see Designing an Internet, The MIT Press, 2018).

He called the mechanism Fate Sharing.

“The fate-sharing model suggests that it is acceptable to lose the state information associated with an entity if, at the same time, the entity itself is lost.” The state of the connection is stored only in the end-points. If the computer dies, the connection dies. The failure is quarantined to the individual.

We moved to a model where we decouple fate from hardware via the Hyperscale Cloud. Hosting on AWS US-East-1 means if your server dies, your app survives due to redundancy. To manage this redundancy, we built a God Layer known as the Control Plane. This software layer creates a shared fate for everyone. When the Control Plane fails, every customer goes down, even if their servers are healthy.

By trying to save the individual from death, we condemned the collective to extinction.

An Epistemological Collapse: The Hayekian Trap

Friedrich Hayek’s defining contribution to economics was the Calculation Problem. Hayek argued that central planning fails because planners are blind. It isn’t their fault. He exposed how no single entity can possibly possess the dispersed, fleeting, “tacit knowledge” of the entire market. In an economy, prices act as signals to coordinate action without central direction. In the original internet, routing protocols acted as these price signals. Local, messy, but adaptive. This is what Hayek called Spontaneous Order.

We paved over the Spontaneous Order to build a Constructed Order.

Embracing collectivism via centralized planning starts a slow march towards destruction of the prime economic force: vitality. In a naturally vital system, there’s space for creative destruction. Creatures live and die. Creatures thrive and suffer. The world goes round and round. This is the natural state of things. It creates opportunities for change and growth, development and improvement. But when centralized and controlled to diminish suffering, we lose vitality. Central planning destroys vitality. At least, that’s what Hayek theorized, and he has been rewarded with quite a lot of supporting evidence over the past century.

We have embraced Computational Central Planning.

Massive service providers like AWS and Cloudflare act as Digital Central Planners. They attempt to maintain Global State, a consistent view of the world across millions of servers and hundreds of datacenters. This is the “synoptic delusion” Hayek warned against.

The catastrophic outages we now experience are the result of the system trying to force infinite complexity into a single database table in Virginia. Consistency Failures occur when the Control Plane in Region A thinks the world is X, while Region B thinks it is Y. The system detects a deviation from the Plan and has a psychotic break.

The rest of us experience this psychotic break as not being able to access LinkedIn, Netflix, or online banking. We have hit the computational limit of central planning. The complexity of the network now exceeds the speed at which a central authority can understand it.

The Digital Road to Serfdom

The original internet architecture created a vacuum, and that vacuum was filled by a new social contract based on safety and centralized control. This is the digital manifestation of Friedrich Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom.

Hayek warned that the slide into servitude is rarely forced by a conqueror. It begins with a voluntary trade. We trade the anxiety of liberty for the promise of security. We trade the chaos of the market for the predictability of the plan.

In the last decade, we made that trade. We exchanged the anxiety of “Best Effort” packet delivery for the security of the Service Level Agreement (SLA). We abandoned the Wild West of the open internet because it felt too dangerous, and we retreated into the Walled Gardens of the Hyperscalers.

The result is exactly what Hayek predicted: a total loss of agency. We are no longer independent nodes in a mesh. We are tenant farmers on Amazon’s land, irrigated by the streams of Cloudflare. We rely on Crowdstrike and Palo Alto Networks as walls to keep the barbarians out. And like all serfs, we are safe right up until the moment the Lord lowers the portcullis.

The Feudal Racket

The original internet protocols created a Naked Network. It moved data but had no concept of value or money. It could not fund or provide for its own defense. David Clark once told me about a conversation he had with a Nobel Laureate Economist in the 1990s. The Economist cornered Clark at a conference: “The internet is about routing money. Routing packets is a side-effect. You screwed up the money-routing protocols!” When Clark replied that he didn’t design any money routing protocols, the Economist shot back: “That’s what I said!”

Because the base layer was defenseless, private actors built castles on top of it. We pay rent to Cloudflare and AWS for protection from the Wild West of the base protocol. These Feudal Lords have no incentive to fix the base layer. Their business model depends on the internet being dangerous. If the Wild West became safe, the value of the walled garden would collapse.

We bought into the theory of hegemony. A digital road to serfdom.

“The theory of hegemony is a theory of stability. It postulates that a system will be long-lived if a single actor is in charge… By taking tussle out of the technical domain… the platform becomes more predictable.” Another useful insight from David Clark, who defines Tussle as the inevitable conflict between adverse interests in an open system.

The internet keeps crashing because we tried to gentrify a jungle. We paved over a resilient, diverse biological ecosystem with an efficient, brittle bureaucratic machine. We face a choice.

Our most likely path given the laws of momentum is to maintain current course and speed. Continue refining for efficiency. Accept that the screen will go dark more often, for longer. This is the path of the Serf.

Or we could choose to return to friction. We could re-embrace Fate Sharing and accept that local failures are healthy. We could own our infrastructure. We could redesign the protocols to handle the Tussle without a middleman.

We’ve built a glass cannon. It is incredibly powerful, perfectly tuned, and destined to shatter.

Get used to it.