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Cloudflare Outage Ruin Your Morning? Consumer Groups Say Blame Profit-Hungry Big Tech Monopolists
"Congress and regulators must finally step in and crack down on anticompetitive behavior, opening markets, requiring interoperability, and ensuring smaller tech firms can compete," said one advocate.
Nov 18, 2025
Just weeks after major Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure outages, Cloudflare on Tuesday became the latest company to "break the internet," prompting consumer watchdogs to take aim at Big Tech and call out industry consolidation.
"This outage is another brutal reminder that the internet is far too dependent on a tiny handful of tech giants," said Public Citizen's Big Tech accountability advocate, J.B. Branch, in a statement. "For years, industry lobbyists have insisted that deregulation would spark innovation from smaller companies. Instead, we got the opposite: mass consolidation of data, compute, and infrastructure into the hands of a few dominant firms whose failures now cascade across the globe."
"Governments and companies continuing to contract with the same handful of companies are increasing the fragility of both the internet and entire economies," Branch continued. "Congress and regulators must finally step in and crack down on anticompetitive behavior, opening markets, requiring interoperability, and ensuring smaller tech firms can compete so the entire digital economy isn't held hostage by the failures of a few dominant companies."
After Amazon's outage last month, Public Citizen and other groups—including the American Economic Liberties Project, Demand Progress Education Fund, and Tech Oversight Project—called on Federal Trade Commission Chair Andrew Ferguson "to swiftly conduct a market structure review of leading cloud services providers, including but not limited to Amazon, to assess how their market dominance and use of monopoly power to stifle competition is creating systemic fragility across industries."
"Big Tech is clearly creating systemic dangers that warrant proactive oversight and aggressive intervention by the FTC, on behalf of the American people and as soon as possible."
"This probe should also examine dependencies of key sectors (such as financial services, telecommunications, and government services) on any single cloud provider and the extent to which those dependencies pose systemic risks to data security and privacy and consumer protection, as well as to our open markets and the resilience of our national and global infrastructure systems," the coalition argued. "We urge you to then take robust agency action to counter these systemic dangers, particularly to bring diversification to the cloud industry."
"Given the enormous stakes, the FTC should not defer action until the next crisis—the FTC has the mandate, the requisite knowledge, and the legal authorities to tackle this challenge now," the coalition concluded. "Big Tech is clearly creating systemic dangers that warrant proactive oversight and aggressive intervention by the FTC, on behalf of the American people and as soon as possible."
Just a few weeks later, the Cloudflare outage on Tuesday impacted websites including ChatGPT, Coinbase, Dropbox, X, Shopify, Spotify, Zoom, the Moody credit ratings service, and many more. According to Cloudflare, the San Francisco-based company offers over 60 cloud services globally, and it protects "20% of all websites."
In a statement to Forbes, a company spokesperson said that "the root cause of the outage was a configuration file that is automatically generated to manage threat traffic. The file grew beyond an expected size of entries and triggered a crash in the software system that handles traffic for a number of Cloudflare’s services."
Stressing that there is "no evidence that this was the result of an attack or caused by malicious activity," the spokesperson added that "we expect that some Cloudflare services will be briefly degraded as traffic naturally spikes post incident but we expect all services to return to normal in the next few hours."
Cloudflare also said on X—which is now working again—that "we always strive to be as transparent as possible in these types of situations, and we will be publishing an in-depth blog shortly."
Meanwhile, Demand Progress Education Fund highlighted the coalition's recent letter to the FTC, and Emily Peterson-Cassin, the group's policy director, said that "yet again, a failure at one company disrupted the lives of people all around the globe."
"Big Tech's relentless drive to become the only fish in the pond and centralize the internet in their hands threatens our economy and our national security," she added. "The FTC has the knowledge and the power to help prevent this from happening again. For all our sakes, the agency must take action immediately."
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Report Details Massive Federal Contracts, Enforcement Actions Against Trump's Ballroom Donors
"These are not random donations," said Public Citizen. "It's a clear-as-day effort to kiss up to the Trump administration."
Nov 03, 2025
As President Donald Trump has embarked on the $300 million demolition of the East Wing of the White House—a project he insists has been "longed for" for more than a century—he has openly said that he and "some of [his] friends" are paying for the ballroom he is building.
But an analysis on Monday detailed just how "massive, inescapable, and irremediable" the donors' conflicts of interest are, as more than a dozen of the presidents' "friends" have major government contracts and are facing federal enforcement actions.
The White House has denied that corporate donors to Trump's ballroom construction project have any conflicts of interest, but Public Citizen found that 16 out of 24 publicly disclosed contributors—including three identified by CBS News but not by the White House—have government contracts.
The companies, including Amazon, Google, Lockheed Martin, and Palantir Technologies, have received $279 billion in government contracts over the last five years and nearly $43 billion in the last year. Lockheed is by far the biggest recipient, having received $191 billion in defense contracts over the last five years. The amount the companies have each donated to the ballroom construction has not been disclosed, but Lockheed spent more than $76 million in political donations from 2021-25.
The money the corporations have spent to build Trump's ballroom, said Public Citizen, "are not random donations. It's a clear-as-day effort to kiss up to the Trump administration."
Lockheed is among at least 14 ballroom contributors that are facing federal enforcement actions, including labor rights cases, Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) enforcement, and antitrust actions.
The National Labor Relations Board has before it cases alleging unfair labor practices by Lockheed as well as Google and Amazon.
The big tech firm Nvidia, another donor, has previously been accused of entering into a "quid pro quo" arrangement with the White House when it said it would give 15% of its revenue from exports to China directly to the Trump administration. The company has spent more than $6 million on political donations since 2021 and more than $4 million on lobbying, and faces a Department of Justice antitrust investigation into whether it abused its market dominance in artificial intelligence computer chips.
While Trump has sought to portray the ballroom fundraising drive as one in which his wealthy "friends" have simply joined the effort to beautify a cherished public building, Public Citizen co-president Robert Weissman said the companies are not acting "out of a sense of civic pride."
"They have massive interests before the federal government and they undoubtedly hope to curry favor with, and receive favorable treatment from, the Trump administration," said Weissman. "Millions to fund Trump’s architectural whims are nothing compared to the billions at stake in procurement, regulatory, and enforcement decisions."
In total, the 24 companies identified as ballroom donors spent more than $960 million in lobbying and political contributions in the last election cycle and $1.6 billion over the last five years.
Weissman said the companies' contributions to the president's pet project amount to corporate America "paying tribute" to the White House in order to stave off unfavorable labor rights and antitrust rulings, energy and financial regulations, and SEC actions and oversight, like an investigation into the cryptocurrency firm Gemini over alleged sales of unregistered securities.
"This is more than everyday corporate influence seeking. Paying tribute is a mark of authoritarianism and in making these payments, these corporations are aiding Trump’s authoritarian project," said Weissman. "They should withdraw their contributions.”
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Trump Admin Circulating Plan to Transform Depopulated Gaza Into High-Tech Cash Cow
Under the proposal, the US would take control after "voluntary" relocation of Palestinians from the strip, where proposed projects include an Elon Musk Smart Manufacturing Zone and Gaza Trump Riviera & Islands.
Sep 01, 2025
The White House is "circulating" a plan to transform a substantially depopulated Gaza into US President Donald Trump's vision of a high-tech "Riviera of the Middle East" brimming with private investment and replete with artificial intelligence-powered "smart cities."
That's according a 38-page prospectus for a proposed Gaza Reconstitution, Economic Acceleration, and Transformation (GREAT) Trust obtained by The Washington Post and published in a report on Sunday. Parts of the proposal were previously reported by the Financial Times.
"Gaza can transform into a Mediterranean hub for manufacturing, trade, data, and tourism, benefiting from its strategic location, access to markets... resources, and a young workforce all supported by Israeli tech and [Gulf Cooperation Council] investments," the prospectus states.
However, to journalist Hala Jaber, the plan amounts to "genocide packaged as real estate."
Here comes the Gaza Network State.A plan to turn Gaza into a privately-developed “gleaming tourism resort and high-tech manufacturing and technology hub” with “AI-powered smart cities” and “Trump Riviera” resortgift link:wapo.st/4g2eATo
[image or embed]
— Gil Durán (@gilduran.com) August 31, 2025 at 10:18 AM
The GREAT Trust was drafted by some of the same Israelis behind the controversial Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), whose aid distribution points in Gaza have been the sites of deliberate massacres and other incidents in which thousands of aid-seeking Palestinians have been killed or wounded.
According to the Post, financial modeling for the GREAT Trust proposal "was done by a team working at the time for the Boston Consulting Group"—which played a key role in creating GHF. BCG told the Post that the firm did not approve work on the trust plan, and that two senior partners who led the financial modeling were subsequently terminated.
The GREAT Trust envisions "a US-led multirlateral custodianship" lasting a decade or longer and leading to "a reformed Palestinian self-governance after Gaza is "demilitarized and de-radicalized."
Josh Paul—a former US State Department official who resigned in October 2023 over the Biden administration's decision to sell more arms to Israel as it waged a war on Gaza increasingly viewed by experts as genocidal—told Democracy Now! last week that Trump's plan for Gaza is "essentially a new form of colonialism, a transition from Israeli colonialism to corporate" colonialism.
The GREAT Trust contains two proposals for Gaza's more than 2 million Palestinians. Under one plan, approximately 75% of Gaza's population would remain in the strip during its transformation. The second proposal involves up to 500,000 Gazans relocating to third countries, 75% of them permanently.
The prospectus does not say how many Palestinians would leave Gaza under the relocation option. Those who choose to permanently relocate to other unspecified countries would each receive $5,000 plus four years of subsidized rent and subsidized food for a year.
The GREAT Trust allocates $6 billion for temporary housing for Palestinians who remain in Gaza and $5 billion for those who relocate.
The proposal projects huge profits for investors—nearly four times the return on investment and annual revenue of $4.5 billion within a decade. The project would be a boon for companies ranging from builders including Saudi bin Laden Group, infrastructure specialists like IKEA, the mercenary firm Academi (formerly Blackwater), US military contractor CACI—which last year was found liable for torturing Iraqis at the notorious Abu Ghraib prison—electric vehicle manufacturer Tesla, tech firms such as Amazon, and hoteliers Mandarin Oriental and IHG Hotels and Resorts.
Central to the plan are 10 "megaprojects," including half a dozen "smart cities," a regional logistics hub to be build over the ruins of the southern city of Rafah, a central highway named after Saudi Crown Prime Mohammed bin Salman—Saudi Arabia and other wealthy Gulf states feature prominently in the proposal as investors—large-scale solar and desalinization plants, a US data safe haven, an "Elon Musk Smart Manufacturing Zone," and "Gaza Trump Riviera & Islands" similar to the Palm Islands in Dubai.
In addition to "massive" financial gains for private US investors, the GREAT Trust lists strategic benefits for the United States that would enable it to "strengthen" its "hold in the east Mediterranean and secure US industry access to $1.3 trillion of rare-earth minerals from the Gulf."
Earlier this year, Trump said the US would "take over" Gaza, American real estate developers would "level it out" and build the "Riviera of the Middle East" atop its ruins after Palestinians—"all of them"—leave Palestine's coastal exclave. The president called for the "voluntary" transfer of Gazans to Egypt and Jordan, both of whose leaders vehemently rejected the plan.
"Voluntary emigration" is widely considered a euphemism for ethnic cleansing, given Palestinians' general unwillingness to leave their homeland.
According to a May survey by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research, nearly half of Gazans expressed a willingness to apply for Israeli assistance to relocate to other countries. However, many Gazans say they would never leave the strip, where most inhabitants are descendants of survivors of the Nakba, the ethnic cleansing of more than 750,000 Palestinians during the creation of Israel in 1948. Some are actual Nakba survivors.
"I'm staying in a partially destroyed house in Khan Younis now," one Gazan man told the Post. "But we could renovate. I refuse to be made to go to another country, Muslim or not. This is my homeland."
The Post report follows a meeting last Wednesday at the White House, where Trump, senior administration officials, and invited guests including former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair, investor and real estate developer Jared Kushner—who is also the president's son-in-law—and Israeli Minister of Strategic Affairs Ron Dermer discussed Gaza's future.
While Dermer reportedly claimed that Israel does not seek to permanently occupy Gaza, Israeli leaders including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu—who is wanted by the International Criminal Court for alleged crimes against humanity and war crimes including murder and forced starvation in Gaza—have said they will conquer the entire strip and keep at least large parts of it.
"We conquer, cleanse, and stay until Hamas is destroyed," Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich recently said. "On the way, we annihilate everything that still remains."
The Israel Knesset also recently hosted a conference called "The Gaza Riviera–from vision to reality" where participants openly discussed the occupation and ethnic cleansing of the strip.
The publication of the GREAT Trust comes as Israeli forces push deeper into Gaza City amid a growing engineered famine that has killed at least hundreds of Palestinians and is starving hundreds of thousands of more. Israel's 696-day assault and siege on Gaza has left at least 233,200 Palestinians dead, wounded, or missing, according to the Gaza Health Ministry—whose casualty figures are seen as a likely undercount by experts.
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