CDN Centralization Fragility
Content Delivery Networks were designed to make the internet faster and more reliable by distributing content across global edge servers. And they do — for normal operations. But the CDN market has consolidated dramatically. Cloudflare, Akamai, and Fastly together serve a majority of internet traffic. When one of these providers has an outage, it doesn't take down one website — it takes down thousands simultaneously. The June 2021 Fastly outage knocked out Amazon, Reddit, the UK government, and major news sites for an hour. The Cloudflare outage in June 2022 disrupted Discord, Shopify, and thousands of businesses. The infrastructure designed to prevent single points of failure has itself become a single point of failure, just at a higher level of abstraction.
What people believe
“CDNs make the internet faster and more reliable.”
| Metric | Before | After | Delta |
|---|---|---|---|
| Average page load time | 3-5 seconds | 1-2 seconds | -60% |
| Blast radius of CDN outage | Single site | Thousands of sites | +10,000% |
| Internet resilience | Distributed | Concentrated in 3-4 providers | Fragile |
| Major CDN outages per year | Rare | 4-6 significant incidents | Increasing |
Don't If
- •Your entire infrastructure depends on a single CDN with no fallback
- •Your origin servers can't handle any direct traffic without CDN
If You Must
- 1.Implement multi-CDN failover for critical services
- 2.Maintain origin server capacity to handle degraded traffic during CDN outages
- 3.Use DNS-based failover that can route around CDN outages
- 4.Test CDN failure scenarios regularly in disaster recovery drills
Alternatives
- Multi-CDN architecture — Use 2+ CDN providers with automatic failover
- Edge computing at origin — Distribute origin servers geographically rather than relying on CDN edge
- Graceful degradation — Design sites to function (slowly) without CDN rather than fail completely
This analysis is wrong if:
- CDN market diversifies to 10+ providers with roughly equal market share
- Major CDN outages decrease in frequency and blast radius over time
- Websites maintain full functionality during CDN provider outages without multi-CDN architecture
- 1.Fastly Outage Post-Incident Report (June 2021)
Single configuration error took down Amazon, Reddit, UK government sites for ~1 hour
- 2.Cloudflare Outage Report (June 2022)
BGP configuration change disrupted Discord, Shopify, and thousands of businesses
- 3.W3Techs: CDN Market Share
Market concentration data showing top 3 CDNs serve majority of web traffic
- 4.ACM: The Consolidation of Internet Infrastructure
Academic analysis of how CDN consolidation creates systemic risk for the internet
This is a mirror — it shows what's already true.
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