One small mistake and the entire internet can come to a standstill! Why is the digital system so fragile? Know what is the real reason

In fact, even though the Internet may appear huge and high-tech from outside, behind it lies a very complex and sometimes shockingly weak structure. If there is a glitch in one server, there is a DNS problem somewhere or a software update is implemented incorrectly, then this problem can spread all over the world like a chain reaction.

The Internet is a network of millions of nodes, but still many important services depend on a few big platforms. This is why every outage exposes the real weakness of this system.

Cloudflare’s role in this entire structure is very important. The common user feels that he accesses a website directly, whereas in reality Cloudflare acts as a security and traffic management gatekeeper in between. It keeps copies of websites on its data centers spread across the world so that the user gets data from his nearest server and the speed increases. Apart from this, it also protects against large-scale DDoS attacks. Therefore it is called both the traffic controller and security guard of the Internet.

Problems arise when Cloudflare itself becomes victim of some glitch. Sometimes a file gets corrupted during an update, sometimes a bug gets activated in the Bot Management system or there is excess load on one of the servers. In such a situation, the server is unable to handle itself and outage starts. This is not a cyber attack but the own weakness of the technical infrastructure which people often misunderstand.

The biggest concern is that the backbone of the Internet is now in the hands of a few select companies like AWS, Google Cloud, Azure and Cloudflare. This is called single point of failure. If any one of these shuts down, the impact is felt all over the world. This risk is even bigger for India because now payments, e-commerce, stock trading, banking and government services are completely cloud based.

That is why it is important that companies do not depend only on speed, but also prepare a strong backup system. By adopting Multi-CDN and Multi-Cloud strategy, traffic can be redirected to other routes at the required time so that if one platform like Cloudflare is down, the entire system does not come to a standstill. This is the only way in the digital age to avoid the shock of future outages.