Nothing screams ‘prime phishing grounds’ like a nationwide outage.

The June 12th Cloudflare Outage that took down Spotify, Netflix, Discord, and more

Remember yesterday when half the internet went dark?

As Twitch, Netflix, and Discord blinked offline, a four-hour window of pure digital chaos opened up, exactly the kind of moment phishermen live for. Confusion, urgency, and millions of users desperate for answers.

It’s the cyber attack cycle in motion: first comes outage then comes phising.

Before I get into how to recognize phishing attempts, build failure-resistant systems, prepare your team, and handle outages with confidence, let’s recap the tech meltdown that set the stage:

The disturbances began around 2pm ET when thousands started flooding Downdetector to report errors on popular sites across the internet including: Twitch, Shopify, Etsy, Snap, Rocket League, Netflix, Apple Music and more. By 4pm, Cloudflare announced the outage stemmed from a breakdown in “a 3rd party service that is a key dependency.”

As the timeline emerged, the root cause traced back to a broader failure: Google Cloud’s identity services had begun faltering…