Short NET

Paradoxical Truth: The more the Internet centralizes on Cloudflare as a single edge, the more fragile and systematically risky that edge becomes.

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Public Letter to Elon Musk on Cloudflare Crash 11/18/25

Public Letter to Matthew Prince responding to Technical Post-Mortem

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Mr. Prince:

Thank you for your honest, transparent and detailed post-mortem of the outage today. Your team – led by your talented CTO, Dane Knecht – swiftly identified the root cause as a cascading failure triggered by a bug in the “proxygen” service during an internal network failover. The subsequent and expedient global rollback is a testament to Cloudflare’s operational excellence.

Although your blog post effectively addresses the technical flaw, I am writing to highlight the systemic paradox that the incident (and prior incidents) revealed – one that I believe presents both a critical challenge, and a significant strategic opportunity for Cloudflare.

The systems paradox is this: the more indispensable Cloudflare becomes as the Internet’s edge, the more a single, localized failure within your system risks global disruption. Today’s event was a clear catalyst; a single software bug – as you documented – impacted millions of global communities and markets, from X, ChatGPT, Shopify and Coinbase, demonstrating a profound concentration of risk.

The solution, as seen in hyperscale entities like Netflix is a multi-CDN, multi-DNS strategy. The trade-off has traditionally been cost and complexity. But for the global economy, where the services running on your network move markets and shape geopolitical discourse, this is no longer a luxury – it is a mounting imperative. The market will eventually demand a solution to this systemic paradox – with or without Cloudflare’s leadership.

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Respectively as a tech investor, this is where the opportunity lies. Could Cloudflare, with its unparalleled global network and technical talent, evolve its model?

Could you develop a suite of services that orchestrates and manages traffic across not only your own best-in-class network but also integrates with other CDNs or DNS providers? You would be selling the ultimate product: guaranteed uptime.

Instead of forcing enterprises to choose between Cloudflare or resilience, you could offer them Cloudflare and resilience, abstracting away the complexity of a multi-provider world while remaining the primary control plane.

You have built the world’s most important edge for the digital world and the upcoming world of AI – and I may be wrong here – but I believe the next step for your talented team of engineers is to build an Internet without a single point of failure. I believe Cloudflare is one of the few companies with the vision and capability to solve this foundational problem.