Today delivered a stark reminder of how much pressure the internet’s infrastructure is under — and how quickly platform-level disruptions ripple across the digital ecosystem. Microsoft revealed that Azure successfully mitigated the largest DDoS attack ever recorded: a globally distributed flood reaching 15.72 Tbps from more than 500,000 IP addresses. The scale shows how cheaply attackers can now amass enormous firepower, and how cloud providers must routinely defend against traffic volumes previously considered unthinkable.

But sophistication doesn’t guarantee stability. Hours later, Cloudflare suffered an outage triggered by a “spike in unusual traffic,” briefly degrading services across X, ChatGPT, and other major apps — a sharp illustration of how deeply modern platforms depend on the resilience of a few global intermediaries.

And outages at this layer carry more than operational risk. “When internet infrastructure providers like Cloudflare go down, it doesn’t just disrupt sites that rely on it: It can pose serious privacy risks for users,” commented NymVPN’s Chief Digital Officer Rob Jardin. “As Cloudflare is the intermediary between millions of users and the web… this can reveal the real IP addresses of people, creating opportunities for specific cyber-attacks…” He added that moments like these are a “clear example” of the dangers of putting “all our digital eggs in one basket.”

He continued: “When a single, centralized company holds the keys to so much of the internet, a problem on their end instantly becomes a problem for everyone’s privacy and security.”

Together, the two incidents highlight a fragile balance: Cloud hyperscalers can withstand record-breaking attacks one day and stumble over unexpected traffic the next. As networks grow more programmable and interdependent, resilience will depend less on raw capacity and more on real-time intelligence, anomaly detection, and automated recovery.