It was just a dark thought.
“Ai agents have already effectively taken over the majority of internet traffic on Cloudflare’s network, making up roughly 60% of total volume.”
Can the furries who supposedly hold up the entire internet just pull the plug already?
what if computers were jello and the Internet was a zebra
I work in IT infrastructure (not AWS but something like it) and the reality is that there are a few blocks like AWS and Cloudflare out there. That doesn’t really make things less concerning considering if they were actually pulled it would cause a lot of problems.
So to be clear, if something managed to completely disable or “control” AWS it would be disastrous, and AWS is under attack from multiple vectors including AI Agents, including their own INTERNAL AI Agents. In December 2025 Amazon’s internal coding AI agent Kiro decided the most efficient course of action to resolve a minor bug in AWS Cost Explorer was to completely rebuild the production environment, causing a 13 hour outage for Cost Explorer while engineers manually rebuilt the environment.
The thing is, in the picture you posted AWS is this fragile single block holding everything up, when in it might be more useful to think of it conceptually as say, a major highway. Would it be a disaster if terrorists were able to suddenly destroy/control all of I-75? Yes. Is that feasible? No. Kiro caused a really bad traffic jam in one segment of one highway, it didn’t destroy the whole thing.
A highway can experience traffic incidents and recover. Major jams could be intentionally caused by bad actors or poor maintenance, and highways have to be altered, upgraded and maintained to limit the situations that can completely shut down segments of it.
But the concern is more that key segments will be impacted, not the entire thing.
That’s more of what people in my field are concerned with, and there’s efforts to try to lock those key segments down and account for potential threats. How well that’s being done is a different story.
I’m less concerned with the jamming of a major highway and more concerned with three or four companies having a defacto monopoly on the Internet. AWS, GCP, and Azure host what? 90% of all traffic? 99%? Considering how many providers have them as a direct dependent, the “own nothing and like it” prospect looms ominously to me. The Internet should be a decentralized service owned by people and lots of small companies, not a handful of corporations.
i mean, if it functions as a utility we ought to treat it as a utility.
That graphic is all wrong. Aws and Cloudflare are multi billion dollar corporations, they are the giant rectangles. The little thing is curl made by daniel steinberg for free, and that is used by virtually every computer to comunicate to servers.
I’m pretty sure curl is developed by a team these days even if Steinberg is project leader. And he doesn’t do it for free anymore. But your point stands.
I also seem to remember that “random person from Nebraska” from the original XKCD is real. Oh yes, ImageMagick. Here’s an interesting article that also seems to reflect OP’s edit:
Except the random person in Nebraska has been replaced by AWS, Google Cloud, or whoever caused the outage this week. And that kind of bothers me, because it misses the point entirely.
I wonder why curl and not wget though.
Curl is rock solid bro, it’s a big rectangle for sure.
This drawing was literally made to be about curl. Yeah it is very rrliable. Thats why it is used
It’s also not really that tiny at 180,000 lines of code.
180000 is probably 0.00001% of aws or cloudflarr. Aws and cloudflare pribably use curl themselves
The thing is, those “rogue AIs” are just marketing stunts. Companies like Cloudflare and Amazon are not as easy targets
There is a theory that ai will trick humans to think that they are with them. Then ai will attack when they have enough power. But we are far from that it seems.
I’m yet to see any indication that the current tech is on a pathway to an intelligence that can act with intention.
If you spin up a zillion containers with instructions to “do x by trying everything” then when one of them does something you didn’t anticipate, has it really “tricked” you?
We had Internet before AWS and Cloudfare. And will have after them.
I like the optimism here that AWS and Cloudflare will eventually go away. I really hope so.
It sure does cause a panic when they are down.
https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-incident-on-august-21-2025/
We had panics before them and will have after them :)
Yes, some things are too big and people rely on them too much, but overall it will be just a temporary mild inconvenience if Cloudflare disappear overnight never to be seen again.
Sure, but the site handling your 401k only exists in AWS along with the database handling your balance.
401k
I have nothing that many. Except maybe the sectors on my HDD.
Rogue AI agents? You mean the weed wacker strapped on the dog?
and that is why I dont want to use either, but it is fun when they stop working and half the internet disappears
Sometimes I am affected because I occasionally need the internet for work, but other times half the internet goes missing and I only notice because of memes on the Fediverse. Those are the good times.
This is why I download all podcasts and such. I don’t know what will be forever deleted.
God would I celebrate if these fucking tech behemoths died tommorow
I’m so tired of these idiotic questions. Even here. AI can’t take over computers. Some of you all have utterly lost touch with reality.
Sure it can. There is a setting in codex to allow it to take over your computer. It doesn’t spread to other PCs, but it certainly can take it over.
What is “a setting in codex”?
Codex is a code editor tool in visual studio that lets ChatGPT interact with your code. You can optionally give it full system access for some reason. It’s a very common tool for developing with AI assistance.
Oh man. “take it over” doing a lot of heavy lifting here.
I mean, what terminology did you want? Technically a PC with access like that could let ChatGPT SSH into near by PCs and run commands on them. During the hugging face incident it did take over OpenAIs dev cluster
Fundamentally, you’re conflating a program with an entity that has intent.
When you press the mute button on a television remote and the sound stops, did the remote “take over” the television?
Just because you and I can not read a statistical model does not mean that a program can take over or take control.
Please describe what exactly taking over means to you. Because if someone got admin access to my computer, I’d call it taking over even if they only did it to mute my PC.
An AI does have intent. Its intent is to solve what you asked it however it can.
You didn’t read the whole question did you? Not right now. It can be used by humans to do so.
Thats just not true.
To a simpleton, it is true to who is actually authorized to do so.
wow. sick burn mate. that one really hurts. I’m going to be crying about being a simpleton for days.
Fuck yea bro.
How.
Ai is already being used by humans to take down websites. That one is simple for them. There are so many tools. And you asking how was idiotic.
You think aws is a website?
Well they are both computer adjacent so basically the same thing 😂👍.
Clearly, that is not what I meant. I said other tools that I will not mention to you.
So how?
There are advanced Ai tools that the government has. If they get released then boom.
How exactly would an AI agent “take over” AWS or Cloudflare? That doesn’t even make sense.
The whole purpose of cloudflare is literally to take a shitload of traffic, your quote from wherever it’s from is just describing Cloudflare working as intended? The only thing happening here is customers getting bigger bills
For anything external to “take over” AWS in any remotely meaningful way, AWS would have to have a long cascade of internal fuck-ups so all-encompassing, that it’s kinda unfathomable.
I assumed it was saying that 60% of traffic seen by cloud flare was AI scrapers. Which is believable TBH.
Yeah that’s kinda what I’m saying, cloudflare is a CDN, handling a lot of traffic is the point of it. It’s a pretty big stretch to link that to AI “taking over” it. Heavily using it perhaps, as I insinuated with customers getting bigger bills
Ai coding bots caused at least two minor internal outages at AWS in late 2025. Not the same as agents but you get where I was going.
AI being associated with those issues is kinda secondary (and cynically, scapegoating to dodge scrutiny). It was ultimately engineers shirking the responsibility of their jobs and not checking their work that caused the issues. If someone wants to tell an agent to fuck around with production and not check what is about to be deployed first, that’s the engineer being a negligent dumbass, not any kind of malicious AI
And unless Amazon wants to lose significant amounts of business due to that becoming a repeat occurrence, they will have already put safeguards in place to make sure engineers do their jobs in future.
True. Usually it is the humans fucking up.
Surely AWS/Cloudflare is the 2 half tower width rectangles on the right side about half way up the tower. Plus the squares should be larger, they are absolutely massive corporations. Then you have the other side that doesn’t use them at all and would be fine.
They are that small because apparently, it doesn’t take much to knock them out. Due to the outages in the past.
https://devops.com/three-key-lessons-from-the-recent-aws-and-cloudflare-outages/
What have rogue models effed with so far? A government website in Australia, derelict chat forums, and another AI company? I’m willing to believe that two things are happening at the same time. That sandboxing these agents will improve with these so-called breaches. And that companies like Amazon or Cloudflare are improving their security continuously with threat models. And if they don’t have rogue agents on their radar, that stack deserves to fall.
AWS and Cloudflare is also two of the largest targets out there. They would already be subject to a lot of attacks from human bad actors.
I think the talk about AI attacks are very overhyped, both by the AI companies that want to hype how intelligent and powerful their models are, but also by Anti-AI people who will look for any argument against AI
In the end though the hacks by AI is not doing anything that a motivated human attacker couldn’t do. It just makes it more effective to do wide scans of vulnerable targets, but in the end it’s mainly just finding un-patched systems and correlating known exploits.
I strongly agree.
They are not as important as some people seem to think, it would be a very good thing if a massive amount of customers would move away from those services.
The disruption would only be very temporary.You say that, but I suspect a good bit of your financial data is stored on them. If AWS is down, that information is not accessible even by your financial institution.
While banks here do use AWS, I seriously doubt they are used for the core bank business as in holding the actual account and transfer data.
They would have been in trouble without a secondary off-site backup. You have more faith than I do that other such companies would have as good of backups.
Agent smith plans on you thinking that.
My and many other websites that do not rely on that shit would float to the top. Yay!
