Turns out the ‘internet is lava,’ and Cloudflare just showed us how

New Delhi: On November 18, the internet reminded us that it is not made of magic. It is made of cables, servers, electricity, and, apparently, lava lamps.

When Cloudflare went down, many of the world’s most accessed websites, apps, and services suddenly froze. ChatGPT refused to talk. X (formerly Twitter) would not load.

Users were left staring at screens, wondering if their Wi-Fi was acting out.

So what exactly happened?

Cloudflare, one of the biggest companies keeping the internet fast and safe, had a massive outage. Cloudflare protects and routes traffic for millions of websites. When it stumbles, a big chunk of the internet stumbles too. Like many dominoes falling at once.

And here’s where it gets even more fascinating.

Central to the security structure protecting this highly dependable technology are real lava lamps used to help generate cryptographic randomness. Not joke randomness, but foundational, industrial-strength randomness needed to secure encrypted communication across the internet.

A wall filled with dozens of glowing psychedelic lava lamps in its San Francisco office is constantly filmed. The unpredictable, never-repeating shapes inside these lamps are converted into numerical noise that helps create highly secure encryption keys.

It’s beautifully ironic.

The internet, the thing we expect to be powered by invisible algorithms and shiny cloud diagrams, is partly secured by something that looks like desk décor from the 1970s.
These moving blobs of coloured wax help make sure your bank transactions, passwords, and digital conversations stay safe from attackers.

For a few hours, users around the world refreshed routers multiple times, Googled “is the internet down?” only to find even Google confused. It felt like a global reminder: we depend on the internet for everything, work, chats, entertainment, news, memes, cat videos, and ordering food we don’t need.

Cloudflare famously gathers randomness from a wall of 100 lava lamps because cryptography needs unpredictability. The idea: the swirling lava never forms the same pattern twice, making it a perfect chaos generator for secure digital keys.

But yesterday showed us something poetic.

Even the most advanced, encrypted, lava-powered digital civilisation is still fragile. One update or tiny technical issue can make the online world wobble like a lava lamp.