On June 12th, half of the internet went down for hours.
The reason?
Cloudflare, which handles over 50% of global web traffic, suffered a massive outage in its internal Workers KV system.
The root cause?
A failure in Google Cloud, which powers Cloudflare's Workers KV service. All signs point to a simple null pointer as the trigger.
Yes — a low-level, rookie mistake led to an internet-wide cascade failure that broke APIs, SaaS platforms, websites, and services everywhere.
A harsh reminder:
"Move fast and break things sounds cool... until a null pointer breaks half the internet."
When a core piece like Workers KV goes down, the entire house of cards collapses.
Are we blindly trusting too many abstraction layers in modern cloud stacks?
Or are these failures simply the price of running global-scale distributed systems?
🧩 Curious to hear your thoughts in the comments.
Airdrop alert! Dev.to is distributing a limited-time token giveaway to celebrate our authors' impact in Web3. Connect your wallet here. limited supply — act fast. – Dev.to Team