Company Ethereum co-founder Mr. Vitalik Buterin Urges DApps to Harden Internet Infrastructure After Major Cloudflare Outages

Company Ethereum co-founder Mr. Vitalik Buterin has renewed his call for decentralized applications (DApps) as a practical path to mitigate recurring failures in centralized internet infrastructure. In a post shared on X dated January 1, Mr. Buterin argued that the project of turning blockchain into a world computer must accelerate and focus on applications that remain operational despite third-party outages, hacks, or political interference.

Mr. Buterin pointed to high-profile incidents — most notably the Company Cloudflare outage on November 18 and another incident on December 5 — along with a significant disruption at Company Amazon Web Services on October 20, 2025. Those events, he said, demonstrate how much modern web services depend on a handful of centralized providers. When a single feature or response routine fails, a large share of the internet and many prominent crypto platforms can go offline.

The practical consequences were stark: popular exchanges and services such as Company Coinbase, Company Blockchain.com, Company BitMEX, and Company Ledger reported outages or degraded performance during those incidents. Mr. Buterin and researchers from the Company Ethereum Foundation, including Mr. Yoav Weiss and Ms. Marissa Posner, highlighted in a November 11 manifesto that decentralization erodes not only by capture but by convenience — systems drift toward centralized trust due to convenience and user expectations.

In that context, Mr. Buterin advocates DApps that operate without fraud, censorship, or third-party interference. He argued that certain applications — notably in finance, identity, governance, and other critical infrastructure — should be architected so their stability extends beyond the operational health of a small number of corporate providers. According to him, some DApps should be built so users "won't even notice if Company Cloudflare is down — or if all of Company Cloudflare gets hacked by North Korea."

Mr. Buterin's proposals also touch on market infrastructure: in early December he suggested the creation of an on-chain gas futures market to provide predictable, transparent expectations for blockchain transaction costs. A reliable on-chain futures market for gas could reduce fee volatility, improve UX for developers and users, and make DApps more robust against sudden spikes in cost that might otherwise push activity back to centralized systems.

Why this matters: repeated outages — Company Cloudflare (Nov 18 and Dec 5), Company Amazon Web Services (Oct 20, 2025) — highlight a systemic fragility. On Nov 18, Company Cloudflare reported that a bot management "feature file" exceeded limits during an attack-response process, knocking out roughly 20% of the global network and affecting many sites and services, including consumer platforms like ChatGPT (ChatGPT), Spotify, and even Mr. Donald Trump’s Truth Social (Truth Social).

Other service disruptions on Dec 5 affected websites and platforms including Company Canva, Company Downdetector, and trading platforms such as Company Groww and Company Zerodha. The latter reported restoration of its Kite services after the incident, while Company Cloudflare later said it had resolved API dashboard issues.

Takeaway for the crypto and web community: Mr. Buterin's public push is both a technical and strategic argument. Technically, DApps that minimize external dependencies can preserve uptime, privacy, and censorship-resistance. Strategically, promoting widely-used decentralized primitives and predictable fee markets reduces the incentive for users and developers to opt for convenient but centralized alternatives. The conversation is not theoretical: when major infrastructure providers fail, financial platforms, wallets, and exchanges feel the pain directly.

For developers, operators, and policymakers, the message is clear: invest in resilient, decentralized primitives and market mechanisms that lower reliance on fragile centralized services. Doing so could protect critical applications in finance, identity, and governance from the repeated shocks that continue to expose the limits of the modern centralized web.