Cloudflare faced, this Tuesday (18), a . The failure occurred less than a week after the company’s CEO, Matthew Prince, publicly criticized Google’s dominance and the supposed imbalance caused by large companies in the web economy.
During his participation in the Web Summit, in Lisbon, Prince accused Google of drastically reducing the traffic sent to websites and of using web content to train artificial intelligence systems without compensating producers.
He stated that the change in search results, now with AI-generated summaries, caused the flow for crawled pages to plummet. In his view, companies like OpenAI and Anthropic repeat the pattern: they collect information at scale, but do not return the audience.
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Criticism of big tech
The speech gained new weight after this Tuesday’s episode. Despite operating at a different layer of the internet, Cloudflare also concentrates vital functions, such as content distribution, attack protection and security for global platforms.
Services like Shopify, Canva, Riot Games and systems that support AI chats depend on the company’s infrastructure to operate. When Cloudflare fails, the impact quickly ripples across industries, from e-commerce to digital fulfillment.
The discussion about creator remuneration, transparency in data collection and concentration risk had been central to Prince’s speech, who called it “insane” the fact that websites lose revenue by blocking AI trackers.
