[Alpha Biz= Kim Jisun] Cloudflare, a major U.S.-based web infrastructure company, experienced yet another network outage—its second since November 19—causing temporary service disruptions across South Korean cryptocurrency exchanges, delivery platforms, and mapping applications. In October, Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure also suffered large-scale outages just ten days apart, bringing parts of the global internet to a halt.
The incidents are intensifying warnings about “data concentration,” as a small number of companies dominate the cloud and content delivery network (CDN) markets. The top three players are now even resorting to unprecedented cooperative strategies to reinforce system stability.
On December 5, Cloudflare announced via a public notice that it had identified and implemented a fix for issues affecting its dashboard and application programming interface (API) services, and was monitoring the results. The outage caused temporary access failures for a wide range of online services, including AI chatbot Claude, Perplexity, Upbit, Baemin, T Map, and Olive Young.
The rapid rise of artificial intelligence—and the explosive server demand that comes with it—has accelerated the growth of the cloud and CDN industries. However, the market remains highly concentrated, with only a few companies dominating the global infrastructure. Cloudflare alone is responsible for an estimated 20% of global internet traffic. As a result, even a single point of failure (SPOF) at one company can trigger widespread service outages.
Facing increasing criticism and concerns over server reliability, AWS—the industry’s largest cloud provider—joined forces with Google Cloud, the No. 3 player, to launch an “interconnect” system on November 30. The system creates a dedicated link that allows traffic to be rerouted from AWS to Google Cloud in the event of an outage.
AWS has also announced plans to form a similar partnership with Microsoft Azure, the No. 2 cloud provider, in the second half of next year. According to Reuters, the push for cross-cloud interconnection reflects the need to ensure stable connectivity at a time when companies are investing heavily in server infrastructure.
알파경제 Kim Jisun (stockmk2020@alphabiz.co.kr)
