Uploaded November 2025 | Updated September 2026, 2 weeks ago

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#ThisWeekinNET — Episode 110
Cloudflare Principal Network Engineer Tom Strickx joins This Week in NET to reveal what really keeps the Internet running.
From anchors cutting submarine cables to automation detecting “Internet weather,” Tom shares an inside look at how one of the world’s largest networks operates — and why human trust still matters to keep it alive.

We talk about:
• How Cloudflare’s global network evolved since 2017
• The hidden fragility of the Internet (and why it still works)
• Routing leaks, Anycast, and automation
• AI’s growing role in network reliability
• What it’s like inside real data centers

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⏱️ Timestamps:
03:35 — Intro and setup: network automation and why Tom was in Lisbon
04:40 — How Tom joined Cloudflare and early network days
09:10 — Building automation to handle “Internet weather”
14:20 — How the Internet’s “plumbing” really works
16:30 — Submarine cables, the Suez bottleneck, and routing around failures
18:20 — Route leaks and the human factor in Internet fragility (and routing security)
27:30 — Anycast explained and how it powers Cloudflare’s network
32:10 — Automation, vendor challenges, and interoperability
37:00 — Routing security, RPKI, and Internet trust (using AI for network maintenance automation)
48:35 — Data sovereignty, regulation, and localization challenges
54:40 — Energy efficiency and scaling the network, learning through blogging and explaining complex outages
01:00:50 — Data center life and reflections on Cloudflare’s network future