Energy & Commodities risk-off · Tail risk
A what‑if from the future

What if core DNS and a major CDN fail at once?

Simultaneous root-DNS plus dominant-CDN failure freezes e-commerce and SaaS — same shape as a BGP meltdown: mechanical risk-off in crypto/Nasdaq beta that round-trips on restoration. The Jun-2021 Fastly outage (large CDN, swaths of the web dark for ~an hour) is the live analogue — zero lasting market damage. Forward angle: CDN concentration (Cloudflare/Akamai/Fastly) is the real fat tail, so the durable trade is the cloud-resilience/multi-CDN theme, not a persistent index short.

7%
our model probability
over Tail risk
prediction markets — the market's odds
loading live odds…
Anchored to measured history 7% · 90% range 1–13% · 40 dated precedents behind it — a wider range means thinner evidence

Every number ships with its receipt — the odds, the range, the precedents, and a public grade at Reality Check. The statistical machinery that produces it is proprietary.

The butterfly cascade

How this trigger trickles across markets, left → right — the root shock, its first‑order moves, then the ripple effects. Drag any node; tap a market for its real price history.

Resolution timeline — how this probability is moving

Our model's odds (electric blue) over time vs the market's (Polymarket, amber), from the past toward the Tail risk horizon. Each dot is a real macro event that nudged the probability — green pushed it up, red pushed it down. Tap a dot for the source. Loading the probability audit trail…

loading the timeline…

What it would mean

If this plays out, it is a risk-off shock. Simultaneous failures at core DNS and a dominant CDN take down a swath of the web, freezing e-commerce and SaaS. The trigger decomposes into signed root‑shocks — Financial conditions ▲ · Risk appetite ▼ — which propagate through our causal graph to the markets below.

Methodology. Probability and impact are anchored to history and scored against what actually happens — wins and losses, in public, at Reality Check. Market odds live from Polymarket & Kalshi. By Vikas Singh, Quantitative Strategist. Updated 2026-08-13.