Vitalik Buterin Urges Decentralized Apps After Cloudflare Outage

Vitalik Buterin Urges Decentralized Apps After Cloudflare Outage Exposes Infrastructure Weakness

Date: January 1, 2026 Source: Vitalik Buterin

Centralized Outages Spark Vitalik's Warning

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin rang in 2026 with a stark warning: decentralized applications must function independently of centralized infrastructure providers, or risk betraying crypto's founding principles.

His message came after two major outages in late 2025. The Cloudflare disruption on November 18 affected ~20% of hosted websites, including crypto exchanges Coinbase, Blockchain.com, BitMEX, Ledger. An Amazon Web Services outage on October 20 similarly paralyzed Coinbase's trading platform and Base network, along with Robinhood.

"Applications where if you're a user, you don't even notice if Cloudflare goes down—or even if all of Cloudflare gets hacked by North Korea."

Infrastructure Contradictions Exposed

The outages revealed a core contradiction: while blockchains themselves operate decentralized, the applications built atop them heavily depend on centralized cloud providers and CDNs. During Cloudflare's failure, blockchain explorers like Arbiscan and data platforms like DefiLlama went dark, even though Ethereum continued processing transactions seamlessly.

"Decentralization erodes not through capture, but through convenience," warned Ethereum Foundation researchers Yoav Weiss and Marissa Posner in a November manifesto co-authored with Buterin.

Technical Progress Not Enough

Despite celebrating Ethereum's 2025 achievements—increased gas limits, improved node software, zkEVM performance milestones—Buterin emphasized technical scaling alone won't fulfill the network's mission.

"This is not about chasing the 'next narrative wave,'" he wrote, referring to trends like tokenized dollars or political memecoins. Instead, Ethereum must serve as "core infrastructure of a free and open internet" supporting resilient applications in finance, identity, and governance that outlast companies and political systems.