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Our conversation began with a pair of incidents that received less attention than they deserved. Twice in the last month, large sections of the internet were knocked offline. Lee was the first to flag the Cloudflare failure. He described sitting down to write when the 24/7 Wall St site wouldn’t load, followed quickly by outages at X and other platforms. At its peak, roughly 20 percent of the internet was inaccessible.
Cloudflare cited unanticipated data surges as the cause, yet the disruption began just after three in the morning, a period when traffic is typically at its lowest. The explanation raised more questions than answers.
AWS and the Larger Risk Surface
An Overstretched Grid Meets an Overstretched Internet
As soon as we connected the dots to the power grid, the picture grew darker. The United States electricity system is more fragile than most consumers realize. Weather events, outdated transmission hardware, and inadequate redundancy have created fault lines that could be exploited or triggered unintentionally. The Texas ERCOT freeze was a reminder of how quickly a regional grid can collapse. Renewables froze, natural gas pipelines clogged, and millions of residents went days without power.
I emphasized that the internet’s architecture is equally brittle. It was never built to withstand targeted attacks or massive load spikes. It is a collection of interdependent systems held together by layers of software built over decades. Someone with enough technical sophistication and hostile intent could cause sustained outages.
The Intersection of Outages and Everyday Life
Lee added that even households with backup generators face constraints. Units like those made by Generac may supply temporary power, but they require rest cycles and manual maintenance. They are not designed to carry communities for prolonged disruptions. If a widespread internet event coincided with a grid failure, consumers and businesses would be largely in the dark.
We closed by noting that while occasional outages are tolerated as inconveniences, the stakes are rising quickly. With AI, cloud dependency, and electrification accelerating, the tolerance for multi-hour failures is vanishing. The infrastructure underpinning daily life is showing signs of strain, and the consequences of the next major failure could be far more disruptive than the last.
Transcript:
[00:00:00] Lee Jackson: So Lee, we’ve actually had two times in the last month where the internet has almost gone down. I meaning large parts of the internet. And it reflects very poorly on the two companies, who basically broke. You wanna fill us in on how that worked?
[00:00:19] Lee Jackson: I think the biggest bomb was when CloudFlare failed about two weeks ago. And I’m literally, I came into to get on the 24 7 Wall Street site to write, wouldn’t come up. And I went, what’s this? You know, and then I did it a few more times and fiddled around. Well, then I even looked at something now the X was down, you know, the Twitter was down and then others were down.
[00:00:43] Lee Jackson: And literally 20 I, I think the numbers were that 20% of the internet at some point as a result of this, problem at CloudFlare was down and, you know. We can’t have that. There’s too much writing on the internet now, and their basic excuse was, and I thought this was. Extraordinary was that a lot of data and files came in and they, they just didn’t anticipate it or something along those lines.
[00:01:12] Lee Jackson: Like there was too much traffic. But the, the data I read said that they started noticing it at three in the morning.
[00:01:18] Doug McIntyre: Yeah. That’s when everybody was traffic is the lightest. Oh yeah. Everybody was on, so you have them, and then you had AWS which to me is, the king of all,
[00:01:27] Lee Jackson: which is even really bigger.
[00:01:29] Lee Jackson: Yeah.
[00:01:29] Doug McIntyre: To me, that bothers me more because if anything happens to them, the hole it puts in the ground is bigger. yeah. And to this point, Congress just asked the, the head of Anthropic, one of the big AI companies to come testify before. Congress about the chances that the Chinese could launch an AI disruption attack on the United States.
[00:01:51] Doug McIntyre: If you’re gonna do that, one of the first vulnerabilities you’re gonna look at is the, is the internet infrastructure.
[00:01:56] Lee Jackson: Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. And they’d go after AWS and Azure and every
[00:02:01] Doug McIntyre: other big
[00:02:02] Lee Jackson: player in there
[00:02:03] Doug McIntyre: for hosting. I think one of the things that people don’t understand, because they take things for granted.
[00:02:10] Doug McIntyre: The internet and the electricity system in the United States are both unusually vulnerable. You don’t think so because you can turn a light on, you can go on the internet, but imagine if a bad actor or a series of bad actors took down some of this stuff for a while. We’re used to, you know, a tree blows over it knocks your electricity out, you have a generator, or it gets fixed in six hours.
[00:02:36] Doug McIntyre: Imagine if you had a significant section of the United States that went dark, which happened in the New York City area in 1977. That can happen again. Do not. Absolutely. The electricity system in the United States. Is stable or safe, and the internet is just put together with, with spit and rubber bands.
[00:02:56] Doug McIntyre: Really, if you, if you look at how it’s set up bailing wire and duct tape.
[00:03:00] Lee Jackson: Yeah.
[00:03:01] Doug McIntyre: Right. You know, you get the people who, people who are smart enough, and malicious enough to cause an internet outage. it can be done.
[00:03:13] Lee Jackson: And it doesn’t even have to be a bad actor. It can be the weather. Because remember a couple of year, years ago in Texas when they had the incredibly, incredibly cold, first it started as cold, and then it rained, and then it was ice, and the Ercot just it shut down.
[00:03:28] Lee Jackson: There was people that didn’t have power for days, and even though Texas people go, well, Texas is down there in the south. It is in the south, but trust me, I’m from Texas and lived the bulk of my life there. And in Dallas. It, it can get extremely cold in the winter. I mean, it’s not like living up north, but it can get cold.
[00:03:46] Lee Jackson: And literally all of their, all of their reusable renewables were down. They were dead because they were frozen or, or covered in ice and. So that, or a bad actor could be a real dangerous situation. So that’s one thing everybody has to be aware of. It’s funny, down in the south here, especially when I lived on the Gulf Coast, a lot of people have Generac generators and it’ll run for a day, but then you gotta turn it off one day.
[00:04:16] Lee Jackson: One day. One day, then you gotta turn it off. Or maybe it runs 48 hours, but that, then you gotta turn it off and check the oil and all that. ’cause it’s essentially, I don’t know if you’ve ever seen the inside of one, but it looks like a lawnmower, essentially. Yeah. But yeah. So let’s everybody be ready to, see the internet and the power go down at the same time.
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