These Three Companies Keep the Internet Running

Cloudflare, Amazon Web Services, and Microsoft Azure form the technical backbone of countless websites and apps, TECHBOOK reported. The source said these three companies keep the internet running by providing protective, intermediary, and data center functions. Cloudflare checks incoming requests and filters harmful traffic such as during DDoS attacks, and distributes content through a global network with about one-fifth of global internet traffic running through it. AWS and Azure provide storage, computing power, databases, and AI services where many websites exist physically only in their data centers. In fall 2025, several large-scale disruptions affected millions of users. In November 2025, a Cloudflare outage caused ChatGPT, Spotify, Shopify, and X to be temporarily unavailable. A month earlier, an AWS disruption took down Prime Video, Alexa, Venmo, Perplexity, PayPal, and Coinbase. Alexander Rabe of the eco Association of the Internet Industry warned that central infrastructure raises the risk of disruptions affecting many areas simultaneously. The source said the internet functions efficiently but is not automatically resilient.