European startups helping reduce the risk of outages like today’s Cloudflare disruption

A major outage at Cloudflare, a globally dominant infrastructure provider, caused widespread internet disruptions impacting numerous critical services including Spotify, X, and various UK retailers. The incident, triggered by a spike in unusual traffic, underscores the digital economy's heavy reliance on a few core infrastructure providers. This highlights the potential fragility of the internet's backbone and the cascading impact of single points of failure. Cloudflare's outage forced the temporary disabling of some services and led to widespread errors across its network. The company reported the issue was resolved, although some users continued to report problems. Payments and e-commerce felt the shockwave of the outage, with 92% of enterprise e-commerce merchants having suffered payment outages in the past two years, some losing more than €11.3 million (£10 million). The implications of such incidents are far-reaching, affecting everything from social media and e-commerce to backend payment services. The event has highlighted the need for the industry to adopt a "prepper mindset", rehearsing failure scenarios and building modular systems capable of isolating faults. Companies are also looking at diversifying deployment footprints and reducing dependency on single vendors to build resilience. The incident also brings to light the importance of European digital sovereignty and the potential benefits of having more critical infrastructure responsibility within Europe. Companies such as Cloudsmith, which raised €21.9 million to secure the software supply chain, offer alternative approaches to reduce systemic concentration and build resilience against future outages.