In the wake of the Cloudflare outage in November 2025, Ethereum's co-founder, Vitalik Buterin, has renewed his call for the development and adoption of decentralized applications (DApps) as a solution to the vulnerabilities exposed by the incident. The outage, which stemmed from a flaw in Cloudflare's bot detection system, disrupted approximately 20% of internet traffic, impacting major cryptocurrency platforms and other online services. This event, coupled with previous outages affecting Amazon Web Services (AWS), has reignited the debate surrounding the centralization of internet infrastructure and the importance of decentralization.
Buterin argues that the Ethereum ecosystem must prioritize the creation of applications capable of withstanding infrastructure failures, censorship, and even the disappearance of their developers. He introduced the "walkaway test" as a standard for decentralized apps, emphasizing that they should continue running even if the original developers are no longer involved. This vision contrasts with the current internet landscape, where users are often reliant on centralized services. Buterin envisions a future where users wouldn't even notice if Cloudflare were to go down or be compromised.
The Cloudflare outage, which occurred on November 19, 2025, at approximately 19:30 UTC, was attributed to a software misconfiguration related to a bot management "feature file" exceeding its expected limits. The failure led to "502 Bad Gateway" errors and impacted major crypto exchanges like Binance, BTCC, and Coinbase, as well as block explorers like Etherscan and Solscan. The incident not only disrupted trading activities but also highlighted the crypto industry's dependence on centralized internet providers.
In response to the outage, Buterin published a "Trustless Manifesto," advocating for the prioritization of decentralization over broader adoption. He and Ethereum Foundation researchers Yoav Weiss and Marissa Posner argued that integrating hosted nodes or centralized relayers compromises trustlessness, creating potential points of vulnerability.
The incident has spurred renewed interest in Decentralized Physical Infrastructure Networks (DePINs), which utilize blockchain incentives to create and support physical infrastructure. Nökkvi Dan Ellidason, CEO of Gaimin, a DePIN initiative focused on cloud services, emphasized the need for a transition to a genuinely distributed cloud, utilizing globally scattered resources to prevent single points of failure.
EthStorage, a company focused on enabling Ethereum to function as a web server, stated that the AWS and Cloudflare outages highlight the fundamental vulnerability of centralized infrastructure. They emphasized the need for a completely decentralized web stack to avoid single points of failure.
While the crypto ecosystem has made strides in decentralizing blockchains, the Cloudflare outage demonstrated that true resilience requires decentralizing the frontend and storage layers as well. This includes decentralizing Remote Procedure Call (RPC), Domain Name System (DNS), API, indexing, and storage.
Despite the challenges, Buterin remains optimistic about Ethereum's potential to create a more open and resilient internet. He has urged developers to focus on Ethereum's original mission of building a world computer for a freer internet. He also warned against prioritizing fleeting trends over long-term resistance to centralization and censorship. According to Buterin, true DApps must be robust enough that a user would not "even notice if Cloudflare goes down - or even if all of Cloudflare gets hacked by North Korea".
