The internet and its fallible middlemen

We take our digital lives for granted.

- Shweta Taneja

(SHUTTERSTOCK)

After all, the Internet has always been there for most of us. Through the browser and apps in our hands, we search the meaning of life, where to shop, what to wear toa wedding, how to doa birthday party. We read reviews for a new restaurant, book it online, chat with our family and to our AI digital companions, without realising that all of these actions are possible thanks to a handful of large cloud and internet infrastructure providers.

Last month, when Cloudflare’s systems went down for half a day, websites from Ikea to ChatGPT refused to open, showing HTTP errors on browsers. Many of us constantly loaded and reloaded our webpages, heading to check the routers lying in the corner of our living rooms to see if our personal internet was down.

Some called their internet service providers, others got distracted by other digital spaces that were loading and still others waited patiently, without answers.

None of us thought about Cloudflare, a $70.13 billion company that offers cloud services for internet infrastructure, security and performance in 125 countries across the world. Cloudflare is an infrastructure-as-a-service company, one of the handful that has a large, distributed secure network (the backbone of the internet) to connect users like us to each other's devices, and computers. It also offers fast and reliable delivery to websites and applications -- from clients like Ikea, Canva, Walmart and Nike. When you open Canva, the web address in your browser goes through your internet service provider to Cloudflare’s data-centre which reroutes it to Canva, enabling you to land on their homepage.