One company you've probably never heard of controls the infrastructure behind nearly every website you visit - and they could shut down the internet tomorrow. Cloudflare handles over 20% of all global web traffic, making them more powerful than Google or Amazon in terms of internet control.
When you visit Netflix, Discord, Reddit, or millions of other sites, your data secretly routes through Cloudflare's servers first. They act as the invisible middleman, deciding what content loads, what gets blocked, and how fast your internet works. If Cloudflare goes down, approximately 12 million websites immediately become inaccessible.
This happened in June 2022 when a Cloudflare outage broke the internet for millions of users worldwide. Major services like Shopify, FitBit, Peloton, and thousands of news sites went dark simultaneously. Most people had no idea one company was the single point of failure for so much of their digital life.
Here's the terrifying part: Cloudflare can see everything. Every password you type, every private message you send, every website you browse - it all flows through their systems. They claim not to store this data, but they have the technical capability to monitor the internet activity of billions of peoplein real-time.
Even more disturbing, governments and corporations pressure Cloudflare to block websites and censor content. When they dropped the controversial site 8chan in 2019, CEO Matthew Prince admitted he felt uncomfortable with the power his company wielded, saying "We wake up in a bad mood and decide someone shouldn't be allowed on the internet."
The company essentially functions as the internet's unpaid police force, deciding what billions of people can and cannot access online. And most internet users have no idea this single point of control even exists - until it breaks.
What makes this monopoly particularly dangerous is how it happened by accident. Cloudflare started as a simple security service but quietly grew into critical internet infrastructure while regulators weren't paying attention. They now process more internet traffic than entire countries,yet face virtually no oversight or regulation. Unlike traditional utilities, there's no government backup plan if Cloudflare decides to abuse their power.
The company's own employees have expressed concern about their unchecked influence. Internal documents reveal debates about whether they should have the power to essentially "disconnect" entire nations from the global internet. In 2019, when some countries couldn't access Cloudflare, their entire digital economies ground to a halt - online banking, e-commerce, government services, everything stopped working simultaneously.
Perhaps most unsettling: Cloudflare's CEO admits they're "not comfortable" with their power but continues expanding it anyway. They've quietly acquired dozens of smaller internet infrastructure companies, consolidating even more control over the pipes that carry our digital lives.