The new global disruption and the necessity of cyber defense

Following a global disruption in critical internet infrastructure, several major and widely used websites around the world became inaccessible. This incident, which primarily affected the infrastructure provider Cloudflare, once again highlighted the crucial importance of cybersecurity and the stability of digital infrastructures.

On Tuesday, November 18, 2025, a widespread outage occurred in Cloudflare’s services, which set off a chain reaction that disrupted users’ access to numerous essential and popular websites.

Some of the most important platforms affected by this disruption included:

·         ChatGPT: One of the most advanced generative AI models—central to millions of users’ daily interactions with modern technology—experienced a complete outage.

·         X (formerly Twitter): A platform that functions as a major source of breaking news and global communication went offline.

·         Facebook: One of the world’s largest social networks was also impacted.

Cloudflare is a U.S.-based company that provides critical services such as content delivery networks (CDN), cybersecurity protection, and DNS services to millions of websites worldwide. Positioned between the main server of a website and its end users, Cloudflare manages traffic, protects against attacks, and delivers content from the geographically closest point to improve loading speed. Therefore, any disruption in Cloudflare’s performance directly and broadly affects a significant portion of the global internet.

In response to the widespread outage, Cloudflare quickly acted and began communicating with its customers. The company issued an initial statement confirming the issue:

“Cloudflare is aware of and investigating an issue that is potentially impacting multiple customers. More details will be provided as they become available.”

After several hours of technical work, Cloudflare announced in its final update that services were returning to normal and being restored. However, it also issued a warning:

“Customers may still observe higher-than-usual error rates.”

This warning underscores that the full recovery of a complex infrastructure takes time, and complete stability is achieved gradually.

This event — not the result of a foreign cyberattack but a failure at a single point of control — highlights the strategic importance of cyber defense. Overreliance on a limited number of infrastructure providers creates systemic vulnerabilities.

Cyber defense is not merely protection against hackers; it includes a set of strategies and measures designed to ensure business continuity in the face of any type of disruption — physical, technical, human error, or malicious attacks.

Key components include:

Diversification:
Organizations must reduce dependence on a single service provider. Using multiple providers for content delivery and security allows operations to switch to another if one fails.

Rapid recovery strategies:

There must be pre-established mechanisms to reroute traffic to backup infrastructures, even if efficiency temporarily decreases.

Scalability and infrastructure resilience:

Systems must be designed to withstand internal software failures (likely the cause of this incident). This requires distributed micro service architectures and effective fault isolation.

The outage of platforms like ChatGPT and X demonstrated that IT infrastructures have now reached the level of society’s “critical arteries.” Such disruptions affect not only e-commerce but also government communications, financial operations, and access to public information.

When a major service fails, traffic attempts to return directly to origin servers. If those servers are not prepared to handle the sudden load, a “domino effect” of secondary outages occurs, amplifying the scale of disruption.

The recent incident served as a serious wake-up call for all internet stakeholders. In a world where services rely on cloud-based and centralized infrastructures, security and stability are no longer defined solely by firewalls but by the design of architectures resistant to systemic failures.

The necessity of cyber defense now extends far beyond confronting external threats; it includes ensuring service continuity in the face of internal errors, configuration flaws, and software failures within centralized control points.

The future of the internet requires models that combine high efficiency with adequate flexibility and risk distribution.