The internet experienced significant disruption today after a major outage at Cloudflare, one of the most widely used infrastructure providers globally. Critical services including Spotify, X, ChatGPT, Visa, Vodafone, Microsoft Teams and key UK retailers were affected for hours.
Even EU-Startups.com saw degraded performance during the incident, underscoring how deeply Cloudflare sits inside the global web stack.
Cloudflare reported a spike in unusual traffic shortly before midday GMT. This triggered widespread errors across its network and forced the company to temporarily disable some services for UK users while applying a fix.
The company has since stated that the issue has been resolved, although some customers are still reporting login and dashboard problems.
The incident has once again highlighted how dependent the digital economy has become on a small number of core infrastructure providers. Although Cloudflare, AWS and Microsoft Azure enable significant efficiencies, centralising so much of the global web inside a handful of networks creates single points of failure.
Payments and e-commerce felt the shockwave
In the commerce and payments sectors, the consequences of this type of failure can be serious. Thomas Gillan, CEO at BR-DGE, shared with EU-Startups:
“Today’s Cloudflare outage is another reminder of just how fragile the internet’s backbone can be, and how quickly a single point of failure can ripple through global commerce. When a core infrastructure provider goes down, everything connected to it feels the impact. When an outage like this occurs, it’s not just a single site going offline, but potentially all the dependent services, from checkout pages to payment APIs and token services, that fail together.”
Gillan also noted that 92% of enterprise e-commerce merchants have suffered payments outages in the past two years, with some losing more than €11.3 million (£10 million). He added that resilience must be treated as a strategic priority, not an optional feature.
Fadl Mantash, Chief Information Security Officer at Tribe Payments, echoed similar concerns in her statement to EU-Startups:
“When a single upstream provider experiences issues, the impact doesn’t stay contained; it cascades across industries, touching everything from social media platforms to e-commerce checkouts and backend payment services.”
Mantash argued that the industry must adopt a prepper mindset. Teams should rehearse failure scenarios and build modular systems capable of isolating faults. He emphasised the need to ensure confidentiality, integrity and availability at all times.
European companies already working on resilience
Since Cloudflare is an American provider, today’s outage also highlights why bringing more of this critical responsibility within Europe could strengthen digital sovereignty, improve oversight and reduce exposure to foreign single points of failure. This raises an important question.
Which European companies are building the infrastructure, security and resilience tools that can help reduce over-reliance on global giants such as Cloudflare, AWS or Azure?
Several startups covered by EU-Startups in 2025 have raised funding and are working on technologies that strengthen different layers of the stack. Although they are not direct Cloudflare replacements, they offer alternative approaches that reduce systemic concentration.
These companies do not replace a content-delivery/edge provider, but by diversifying deployment footprints and reducing dependence on single vendors they help build resilience the next time a major infrastructure failure happens.
Cloudsmith (Belfast, UK)
Cloudsmith raised €21.9 million in March 2025 to scale its cloud-native artefact management platform. It helps companies secure and manage the software supply chain across multiple regions and providers. As organisations diversify their deployment footprints and reduce dependency on single vendors, supply chain resilience becomes essential to withstanding global outages.
Exein (Rome, Italy)
Exein secured €70 million in a Series C round in July 2025. The company focuses on embedded cybersecurity for IoT and critical infrastructure. As outages cascade across different layers of the digital ecosystem, the resilience of embedded systems becomes vital to preventing wider failures.
Nscale (Manchester, UK)
Nscale raised approximately €936 million in 2025 to deploy large-scale AI infrastructure across Europe, North America and the Middle East. Its focus on massive AI factory data centres and a vertically integrated cloud platform contributes to building more distributed and resilient compute capacity.
PEAK:AIO (Manchester, UK)
PEAK:AIO secured €5.7 million in 2025 to scale its high-performance storage platform for AI workloads. Its energy-efficient, ultra-fast storage layer helps support reliability and speed for the growing demands placed on AI systems.
CBRX (Vilnius, Lithuania)
CBRX raised €540k in pre-seed funding in 2025 to develop its cloud-based cybersecurity platform aimed at helping MSPs transition into MSSPs. By automating cloud cybersecurity with AI, it adds protection and redundancy across the service chain.
A wider lesson about the internet’s fragility
Today’s Cloudflare outage followed a recent AWS disruption and issues at Microsoft Azure, reinforcing a pattern. The global internet depends heavily on large infrastructure operators. Their services provide scale, speed and security, but centralisation introduces fragility.
European companies are unlikely to replace Cloudflare outright in the near term. However, many are developing technologies that strengthen the overall resilience of the digital ecosystem.
From software supply chain protection to embedded cybersecurity, from large-scale AI infrastructure to high‑performance storage and cloud‑based security automation, Europe is steadily building components that reduce reliance on single points of failure.
As Gillan noted, resilience is no longer a nice-to-have.
Today’s outage was a reminder that even the most sophisticated networks can falter. It also highlighted a growing global divide. While Europe is investing in sovereignty-focused infrastructure and cybersecurity, much of the world still relies on a small cluster of non-European giants whose failures have worldwide consequences.
The question for businesses now is how to prepare for the next disruption and which partners and technologies will help them withstand it.
Read the orginal article: https://www.eu-startups.com/2025/11/european-startups-helping-reduce-the-risk-of-outages-like-todays-cloudflare-disruption/
