The web skilled vital disruption in the present day after a serious outage at Cloudflare, probably the most broadly used infrastructure suppliers globally. Vital providers together with Spotify, X, ChatGPT, Visa, Vodafone, Microsoft Groups and key UK retailers have been affected for hours.
Even EU-Startups.com noticed degraded efficiency through the incident, underscoring how deeply Cloudflare sits inside the worldwide net stack.
Cloudflare reported a spike in uncommon site visitors shortly earlier than noon GMT. This triggered widespread errors throughout its community and compelled the corporate to quickly disable some providers for UK customers whereas making use of a repair.
The corporate has since acknowledged that the difficulty has been resolved, though some clients are nonetheless reporting login and dashboard issues.
The incident has as soon as once more highlighted how dependent the digital economic system has turn out to be on a small variety of core infrastructure suppliers. Though Cloudflare, AWS and Microsoft Azure allow vital efficiencies, centralising a lot of the worldwide net inside a handful of networks creates single factors of failure.
Funds and e-commerce felt the shockwave
Within the commerce and funds sectors, the implications of this kind of failure could be severe. Thomas Gillan, CEO at BR-DGE, shared with EU-Startups:
“Right this moment’s Cloudflare outage is one other reminder of simply how fragile the web’s spine could be, and the way rapidly a single level of failure can ripple by way of international commerce. When a core infrastructure supplier goes down, every little thing linked to it feels the affect. When an outage like this happens, it’s not only a single website going offline, however probably all of the dependent providers, from checkout pages to fee APIs and token providers, that fail collectively.”
Gillan additionally famous that 92% of enterprise e-commerce retailers have suffered funds outages up to now two years, with some dropping greater than €11.3 million (£10 million). He added that resilience have to be handled as a strategic precedence, not an non-compulsory function.
Fadl Mantash, Chief Info Safety Officer at Tribe Funds, echoed comparable issues in her assertion to EU-Startups:
“When a single upstream supplier experiences points, the affect doesn’t keep contained; it cascades throughout industries, touching every little thing from social media platforms to e-commerce checkouts and backend fee providers.”
Mantash argued that the business should undertake a prepper mindset. Groups ought to rehearse failure situations and construct modular techniques able to isolating faults. He emphasised the necessity to guarantee confidentiality, integrity and availability always.
European firms already engaged on resilience
Since Cloudflare is an American supplier, in the present day’s outage additionally highlights why bringing extra of this essential accountability inside Europe might strengthen digital sovereignty, enhance oversight and scale back publicity to overseas single factors of failure. This raises an vital query.
Which European firms are constructing the infrastructure, safety and resilience instruments that may assist scale back over-reliance on international giants equivalent to Cloudflare, AWS or Azure?
A number of startups lined by EU-Startups in 2025 have raised funding and are engaged on applied sciences that strengthen completely different layers of the stack. Though they aren’t direct Cloudflare replacements, they provide different approaches that scale back systemic focus.
These firms don’t substitute a content-delivery/edge supplier, however by diversifying deployment footprints and lowering dependence on single distributors they assist construct resilience the following time a serious infrastructure failure occurs.
Cloudsmith (Belfast, UK)
Cloudsmith raised €21.9 million in March 2025 to scale its cloud-native artefact administration platform. It helps firms safe and handle the software program provide chain throughout a number of areas and suppliers. As organisations diversify their deployment footprints and scale back dependency on single distributors, provide chain resilience turns into important to withstanding international outages.
Exein (Rome, Italy)
Exein secured €70 million in a Collection C spherical in July 2025. The corporate focuses on embedded cybersecurity for IoT and important infrastructure. As outages cascade throughout completely different layers of the digital ecosystem, the resilience of embedded techniques turns into very important to stopping wider failures.
Nscale (Manchester, UK)
Nscale raised roughly €936 million in 2025 to deploy large-scale AI infrastructure throughout Europe, North America and the Center East. Its deal with large AI manufacturing unit knowledge centres and a vertically built-in cloud platform contributes to constructing extra distributed and resilient compute capability.
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 help reliability and velocity for the rising calls for positioned on AI techniques.
CBRX (Vilnius, Lithuania)
CBRX raised €540k in pre-seed funding in 2025 to develop its cloud-based cybersecurity platform aimed toward serving to MSPs transition into MSSPs. By automating cloud cybersecurity with AI, it provides safety and redundancy throughout the service chain.
A wider lesson concerning the web’s fragility
Right this moment’s Cloudflare outage adopted a latest AWS disruption and points at Microsoft Azure, reinforcing a sample. The worldwide web relies upon closely on massive infrastructure operators. Their providers present scale, velocity and safety, however centralisation introduces fragility.
European firms are unlikely to switch Cloudflare outright within the close to time period. Nevertheless, many are creating applied sciences that strengthen the general resilience of the digital ecosystem.
From software program provide chain safety to embedded cybersecurity, from large-scale AI infrastructure to excessive‑efficiency storage and cloud‑based mostly safety automation, Europe is steadily constructing elements that scale back reliance on single factors of failure.
As Gillan famous, resilience is now not a nice-to-have.
Right this moment’s outage was a reminder that even essentially the most refined networks can falter. It additionally highlighted a rising international divide. Whereas Europe is investing in sovereignty-focused infrastructure and cybersecurity, a lot of the world nonetheless depends on a small cluster of non-European giants whose failures have worldwide penalties.
The query for companies now could be how you can put together for the following disruption and which companions and applied sciences will assist them stand up to it.
