The recent Cloudflare outage is estimated to have cost the global economy between $5 billion and $15 billion for every hour of downtime, according to new analysis from SupportMy.website.
With Cloudflare powering approximately 19.3% of all active websites on the internet, the ripple effects are affecting everything from small e-commerce stores to major banking institutions.
The Scale of Impact
The outage exposed just how dependent modern business has become on cloud infrastructure services. Cloudflare supports over 221,000 paying customers and powers roughly one-fifth of the entire internet.
The reach extends deep into corporate America. Approximately 35% of Fortune 500 companies rely on Cloudflare services, while 32.8% of the top 10,000 most popular websites globally utilize Cloudflare infrastructure.
“Cloudflare is a critical system for many companies worldwide and when this system goes down, businesses large and small are affected,” said Jason Long, founder of SupportMy.website. “Right now our customers, from major banks to small mom-and-pop businesses, are struggling to do business and fulfill customer requests.”
Long noted that many businesses don’t realize their dependence on services like Cloudflare until an outage occurs. “It’s one of those systems that businesses don’t realize they need or even use sometimes. But when it’s down, they feel it.”
Methodology
This estimation is based on Cloudflare’s publicly reported 221,000 paying customers, segmented by Enterprise, Mid-market, and SMB tiers. Financial loss calculations utilize average industry downtime costs ranging from $8,000 per hour for SMBs to over $300,000 per hour for large enterprises. The final range of $5 billion to $15 billion accounts for variables such as partial service redundancy, time zone differences during peak business hours, and varying service tiers.