  We study the 't Hooft's brick wall model for black holes in a holographic
context. The brick wall model suggests that without an appropriate near horizon
IR cut-off, the free energy of the probe fields show the divergence due to the
large degenerate states near the horizons. After studying the universal nature
of the divergence in various holographic setting in various dimensions, we
interpret the nature of the divergence in a holographic context. The free
energy divergence is due to the large degeneracy and continuity of the low
energy spectrum in the boundary theory at the deconfinement phase. These
divergence and continuity should be removed by finite N effects, which make the
spectrum discrete even at the deconfinement phase. On the other hand, in the
bulk, these degenerate states are localized near the horizon, and the universal
divergence of these degenerate states implies that the naive counting of the
degrees of freedom in bulk should be modified once we take into account the
non-perturbative quantum gravity effects near the horizon. Depending on the
microscopic degrees of freedom, the position, where the effective field theory
description to count the states breaks down, has different Planck scale
dependence. It also implies the difficulty to have an electron like
gauge-singlet elementary field in the boundary theory Lagrangian. These singlet
fields are at most composite fields, because they show divergent free energy,
suggesting a positive power of N at the deconfinement phase.
