Attack of the Clouds revisited: what the global Outlook outage says about centralization
technollama · x · 2026-11-13
TechnoLlama's Andres revisits his 2013 argument about cloud centralization, sparked by Microsoft's massive Outlook/Teams/Copilot outage: Downdetector logged reports from 74 countries within about an hour, and 12+ hours later Microsoft described recovery as "marginal success". The cloud was supposed to make the web more resilient, but its Achilles heel remains—everyone points their DNS at the same place, and when it goes down everything behind it falls. He first made this point when a 2013 Cloudflare outage took down 700,000+ sites for over an hour, yet admits he's losing the debate: demanding a decentralized global economy is like expecting everyone to stash cash under the mattress. We keep walking into centralization anyway.
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