There isn’t going to be a single answer to why we are experiencing major global internet outages of late. There will be a number of reasons that are all coinciding to produce these recent occurrences.

Recognising these reasons will allow us to predict who is next after AWS, Azure and Cloudflare…

Why is today’s internet so fragile?

Recent outages at AWS, Azure, and Cloudflare have starkly exposed just how fragile today’s internet is, largely due to concentrated infrastructure, dependency on a handful of providers, and architectural choices that allow minor failures to trigger global disruptions.gulfnews+2​

Extreme Centralization

• The internet now relies heavily on a few “invisible” giants: AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, and Cloudflare together account for most global web traffic, hosting, routing, and security.techwireasia+1​
• Cloudflare alone accelerates and protects an estimated 20% of all internet traffic. When any of these services experience issues, disruption ripples across thousands of companies and billions of users, as seen in recent events.computing+1​

Cascading Failures

• Outages often start with technical errors such as DNS failures, network misconfigurations, or buggy software updates. Because so many services are built on top of these platforms, a seemingly small incident can snowball rapidly into crippling downtime across the world.modern-networks+1​
• For example, a DNS outage at AWS led to millions of user lockouts and stalled applications globally, while Cloudflare’s recent bug knocked out platforms like ChatGPT, X (Twitter), Spotify, and many SaaS tools all at once.deployflow+2​

Lack of True Redundancy

• While cloud vendors offer robustness at the hardware and software level, many applications and businesses still depend on single providers or even single cloud regions, lacking the architectural redundancy needed for true resilience.cnn+1​
• Multi-cloud designs are promoted as a solution, but adoption remains slow due to complexity and cost.economictimes+1​

Legacy Internet Foundations

• Critical protocols like DNS, which translate website names to machine addresses, are based on decades-old designs. If DNS fails at a major provider, or a bad configuration is cached globally, the effects can take hours or even days to fully resolve.techwireasia+1​

Economic and Societal Risk

• Because core digital payments, communications, and business tools are now web-based, cloud outages don’t just inconvenience consumers—they can disrupt financial markets, logistics, healthcare, and government.itbrief+1​
• Governments are beginning to treat cloud and network resilience as matters of national security, pushing for failover planning and measures against systemic risk.gulfnews+1​

Driving the Future

• These outages are accelerating moves to adopt decentralized architectures (Web3), distributed CDNs, and alternatives to centralized cloud platforms.gulfnews​
• Still, until broad and real decentralization is achieved, today’s internet remains vulnerable to concentrated points of failure—making global web fragility an ongoing and deeply technical challenge.cnn+1​

Is the complexity of modern software, apps and services that make the internet brittle?

There is strong, concrete evidence that the rising complexity of software, applications, and IT services is directly making the internet more brittle and increasingly prone to outages.uptimeinstitute+2​

How Complexity Drives Fragility

• Modern applications are built on tightly interdependent components, microservices, APIs, and SaaS layers. Even minor changes—like a configuration tweak or a faulty software update—can cascade through interconnected systems, causing large-scale outages.ashrafmageed+1​
• Real-world outages, such as the infamous Facebook, AWS, and Azure disruptions, have repeatedly been traced back to software bugs, unexpected side effects between services, or misconfigurations in complex control planes.thousandeyes+1​

Concrete Examples

• The October 2021 Facebook outage resulted from a misconfiguration update that propagated through its global BGP (Border Gateway Protocol) infrastructure, causing a full disconnection from the internet—demonstrating how internal software complexity can have massive external effects.theintelligraph​
• The 2020 Azure and recent AWS outages were triggered by subtle software bugs or missteps in automated update pipelines. What began as isolated technical errors quickly led to global knock-on effects due to hidden dependencies and insufficient isolation between services.thousandeyes+1​
• The CrowdStrike security software update in 2024 caused mass Windows system crashes and “bootloops,” showing how a flaw in widely deployed software had a systemic effect far beyond one organization.news.exeter​

Industry Data and Research

• Reports from Uptime Institute and industry observers state that software, network, and configuration issues—many stemming from growing complexity—are the fastest-growing sources of critical IT outages. As architectures shift to the cloud, hybrid or multi-cloud forms, and “infrastructure as code,” the number of places where failure can originate multiplies.securitybrief+1​
• Complexity makes it harder for engineers to fully understand the system, increasing cognitive load. Documentation may lag, tests are often brittle, and adding new features or changing existing code can unintentionally break other parts of the stack, amplifying the risk of downtime.codurance+1​

In Summary

• Concrete evidence from industry reports, postmortems, and technical analyses shows that software and architectural complexity is now a leading cause of major outages across the internet and digital services.uptimeinstitute+2​
• As IT services and software systems become ever more entangled, even small mistakes or bugs can propagate, causing widespread disruption and emphasizing the need for simplicity, redundancy, and rigorous testing in critical systems.theintelligraph+1​

The third reason for internet outages being more common and prevalent in the modern age

A third major reason internet outages are more common in the modern age is the increased frequency and sophistication of cyberattacks, including ransomware and targeted digital assaults on critical infrastructure.datacenter.uptimeinstitute+2​

Cybersecurity Threats and Ransomware

• Recent years have seen a rapid rise in outages caused by cyberattacks, especially ransomware campaigns and distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks targeting cloud providers, SaaS platforms, and essential network infrastructure.telconews+1​
• These attacks can disable services, corrupt data, and sometimes require shutting down affected systems entirely for forensic investigation and restoration.datacenter.uptimeinstitute​
• As much as the physical and software layers have become more complex, new vulnerabilities are constantly emerging, and attackers exploit these with increasing speed and precision, making outages both more frequent and severe.teridion+1​

Why This Is Rising

• Greater digital transformation and cloud adoption have made critical services attractive and lucrative targets for cybercriminals.telconews+1​
• Even well-secured organizations are vulnerable to supply-chain attacks—where the compromise of a key vendor or upstream software provider can cascade globally and impact hundreds or thousands of customers at once.datacenter.uptimeinstitute​
• Research and industry analyses show that successful large-scale ransomware and cyber incidents are now among the leading triggers of major public outages, alongside centralization and complexity.telconews+1​

In summary, cyberattacks—especially ransomware—represent a third key factor making internet outages more prevalent and impactful in the modern era, adding to the fragility created by centralization and increasing system complexity.teridion+2​

Who will have the next outage that will affect the global internet?

Based on current evidence and industry analysis, the next global internet outage is most likely to be triggered by one of two sources: either a failure at a major cloud or infrastructure provider due to software or configuration errors, or a cyberattack targeting critical cloud services or undersea cables. However, there is also significant expert concern that a severe solar storm during the predicted Solar Maximum in 2025 could cause even wider disruption by damaging undersea cables and global communication infrastructure.financialexpress+2​

Most Direct Triggers

• Cloud Provider Error: Given recent patterns, a chain reaction sparked by a misconfiguration, flawed software update, or unexpected cascade within AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, or Cloudflare remains the most likely culprit for another major outage. The interconnected nature of cloud services means a localized issue can propagate system-wide in minutes.thousandeyes+1​
• Cyberattack: Large-scale, coordinated ransomware or DDoS campaigns are rising and present a considerable threat. Critical SaaS, CDN, and DNS infrastructure are prime targets. A breach in a major provider or a critical software library could affect thousands of businesses globally at once.reports.weforum+1​

Solar Storm Risk

• Solar Maximum 2025: Some experts now warn that natural events—specifically powerful solar storms—could damage undersea fiber links and data centers, causing internet outages far more widespread and unpredictable than anything to date. While rare, the impact could last for days or even months, with recovery depending on the ability to repair undersea infrastructure and restore communications.cnbctv18+1​

Unpredictable Factors

• It’s increasingly difficult to forecast who or what will cause the next global outage because architectures are more complex, attack surfaces are broader, and even well-intentioned updates or external environmental events can have devastating consequences.financialexpress+1​

In summary, the next global internet outage is most likely to be created by a technical failure or attack affecting critical infrastructure (cloud, DNS, CDN), but severe space weather disruptions are also being seriously considered by experts for 2025.cloudflare+2​

Among GCP (Google Cloud Platform), Broadcom, Oracle, IBM, Meta, and Apple, GCP carries the highest risk of causing the next global internet outage. This is due to its position as a major cloud service provider, with deep integration into SaaS, enterprise infrastructure, APIs, and many consumer services. Outages from cloud providers frequently propagate to thousands of dependent services and users worldwide, amplifying systemic impacts.insuranceinsider​

Why GCP Is Most Likely

• Cloud providers pose systemic risk because centralized cloud infrastructure hosts, manages, and routes massive portions of the world’s internet traffic.cybcube+1​
• GCP, while smaller than AWS and Azure, still represents a major aggregation point: it powers business-critical workloads (banking, retail, logistics), hosts thousands of SaaS platforms, and provides back-end APIs for many mobile apps and connected devices.insuranceinsider​
• Recent cloud incidents (AWS, Azure, Cloudflare) have proven how failures in authentication, DNS, or network configuration can quickly cascade to global impact, and GCP’s technical complexity and interconnections make it vulnerable to similar risks.piranirisk+1​

Risk Assessment of Others

• Broadcom: While it designs key hardware and networking gear, it is less likely to directly trigger a software or routing-linked global outage at internet scale. Its risks are supply-chain and chip-related, not service aggregation.carnegieendowment​
• Oracle, IBM: Both power significant enterprise IT, but they are not primary cloud or content routing platforms for consumer web services. Oracle Cloud is growing but has not reached the single-point-of-failure scale of GCP or AWS.insuranceinsider​
• Meta, Apple: Outages from these can severely disrupt social media or device ecosystems, but they do not underlie the broad global infrastructure dependencies typical of a cloud provider failure.carnegieendowment​

Industry Consensus

Reports and regulators consistently identify major cloud providers as critical “single points of failure.” When cloud aggregation, concentration, and technical complexity are considered, GCP ranks highest within your list for systemic outage risk.cybcube+1​

In summary, GCP is the most likely among your choices to trigger the next global-scale outage, because cloud providers are at the heart of internet infrastructure and software dependencies today.cybcube+1​