Yesterday's massive outage at Cloudflare really taught the whole community a lesson.

Guess what? A bunch of applications that we talk about every day with "decentralization" have also taken a hit. I won't even mention platforms like Coinbase, but even wallets like MetaMask can't be accessed. New projects like Hyperliquid, Pengu, and WiFi have all been wiped out, and even established DeFi protocols like Tron, Aave, and Curve haven't escaped. The two Layer 2s and public chains, OP and Sui, are also out of commission.

Ten applications, collectively defeated.

The question arises - does this still count as Web3?

To be honest, the more I think about it, the more surreal it seems. We talk all day about anti-censorship, trustlessness, and not relying on a single point of failure, but what happens? When one cloud service provider has an issue, the front-end interfaces of half the crypto world go offline collectively. Users can't even see their own assets, let alone trade.

Sometimes I really wonder if the so-called "true decentralization" was just a beautiful fantasy from the very beginning? The underlying protocol does run on the chain, and no one can shut down the smart contracts, but what about the user access layer? What about the API services? What about the front-end hosting? If any of these links get stuck, what difference does it make for ordinary people compared to a centralized platform going down?

Perhaps we should admit: at this stage, Web3 is more like "centralized applications dressed in decentralization." The dependency on infrastructure is much more serious than we are willing to acknowledge.