Wikipedia

Cloudflare

Cloudflare, Inc.,is an American company that providescontent delivery networkservices,cybersecurity,DDoS mitigation,wide area networkservices,reverse proxies,Domain Name Service,ICANN-accredited[3]domain registration,and other services.[4][5][6]Cloudflare's headquarters are in San Francisco, California.[4]According to W3Techs, Cloudflare is used by around 19.3% of all websites on the Internet for its web security services, as of January 2025.[7]

Cloudflare, Inc.
Company typePublic
IndustryInformation and communications technology
FoundedJuly 2009;15 years ago(2009-07)
FounderLee Holloway
Matthew Prince
Michelle ZatlynEdit this on Wikidata
HeadquartersSan Francisco,California, U.S.
Key people
Brands1.1.1.1
Servicesreverse proxy,edge computing,streaming media,identity management,virtual private network
RevenueIncreaseUS$1.297 billion(2023)
Negative increaseUS$−185 million(2023)
Negative increaseUS$−184 million(2023)
Total assetsIncreaseUS$2.759 billion(2023)
Total equityIncreaseUS$763 million(2023)
Number of employees
3,682 (2023)
SubsidiariesArea 1 Security
ASN
Websitewww.cloudflareEdit this at Wikidata
Footnotes / references
[1][2]

History

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Cloudflare was founded in July 2009 byMatthew Prince,Lee Holloway, andMichelle Zatlyn.[2][8][9]Prince and Holloway had previously collaborated onProject Honey Pot,a product of Unspam Technologies that served as some inspiration for the basis of Cloudflare.[10]From 2009, the company was venture-capital funded.[11]On August 15, 2019, Cloudflare submitted itsS-1filing for IPO on theNew York Stock Exchangeunder the stock ticker NET.[12]It opened for public trading on September 13, 2019, at $15 per share.[13]

In 2020, Cloudflare co-founder and COOMichelle Zatlynwas named president, making her one of the few female presidents of a publicly traded technology company in the U.S.[14]

Cloudflare has acquired web-services and security companies, including StopTheHacker (February 2014),[15]CryptoSeal (June 2014),[16]Eager Platform Co. (December 2016),[17]Neumob (November 2017),[18]S2 Systems (January 2020),[19]Linc (December 2020),[20]Zaraz (December 2021),[21]Vectrix (February 2022),[22]Area 1 Security(February 2022),[23]Nefeli Networks (March 2024), BastionZero (May 2024),[24]and Kivera (October 2024).[25]

Since at least 2017, Cloudflare has been using a wall oflava lampsin their San Francisco headquarters as asource of randomnessfor encryption keys, alongsidedouble pendulumsin its London offices and ageiger counterin its Singapore offices.[26]The lava lamp installation implements theLavarandmethod, where a camera transforms the unpredictable shapes of the "lava" blobs into a digital image.[27][26]

In Q4 2022,Cloudflare provided paid services to 162,086 customers.[28]

Products

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Cloudflare provides network and security products for consumers and businesses, utilizing edge computing,reverse proxiesforweb traffic,data center interconnects, and acontent distribution networkto serve content across its network of servers.[29]It supportstransport layerprotocolsTCP,UDP,QUIC,and manyapplication layerprotocols such asDNS over HTTPS,SMTP,andHTTP/2with support forHTTP/2 Server Push.[30]As of 2023,Cloudflare handles an average of 45 million HTTP requests per second.[31]

Artificial intelligence

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In 2023, Cloudflare launched Workers AI, a framework allowing for use ofNvidiaGPU's within Cloudflare's network.[32]

In 2024, Cloudflare launched a tool that prevents bots from scraping websites. To build automatic bot detector models, the company analyzed AI bots and crawler traffic.[33]The company also launched an AI assistant to generate charts based on queries by leveraging Workers AI.[34]

DDoS mitigation

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Cloudflare provides free and paidDDoS mitigationservices that protect customers from distributeddenial of service(DDoS) attacks. Cloudflare received media attention in June 2011 for providing DDoS mitigation for the website ofLulzSec,ablack hat hackinggroup.[35]

In March 2013,The Spamhaus Projectwas targeted by a DDoS attack that Cloudflare reported exceeded 300gigabits per second(Gbit/s).[36][37]Patrick Gilmore, ofAkamai,stated that at the time it was "the largest publicly announced DDoS attack in the history of the Internet". While trying to defend Spamhaus against the DDoS attacks, Cloudflare ended up being attacked as well; Google and other companies eventually came to Spamhaus' defense and helped it to absorb the unprecedented amount of attack traffic.[38]

In 2014, Cloudflare began providing free DDoS mitigation for artists, activists, journalists, and human rights groups under the name "Project Galileo".[39]In 2017, they extended the service to electoral infrastructure and political campaigns under the name "Athenian Project".[40][41]By 2020, more than 1,000 users and organizations were participating in Project Galileo, including 31 US states.[42][43]

In February 2014, Cloudflare claimed to have mitigated anNTP reflection attackagainst an unnamed European customer, which they stated peaked at 400 Gbit/s.[44][45]In November 2014, it reported a 500 Gbit/s DDoS attack in Hong Kong.[46]In July 2021, the company claimed to have absorbed a DDoS attack three times larger than any they'd previously recorded, which their corporate blog implied was over 1.2Tbit/sin total.[47]In February 2023, Cloudflare reported blocking a 71 million request-per-second DDoS attack which "the company says was the largest HTTP DDoS attack on record".[48]

Cloudflare blocked the largest publicly-recorded DDoS attack in October 2024, with volumetric attacks peaking at 5.6terabitsper second.[49]

Edge computing

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In 2017, Cloudflare launched Cloudflare Workers, aserverless computingplatform for creating new applications, augmenting existing ones, without configuring or maintaining infrastructure. It has expanded to include Workers KV, a low-latencykey-value data store;Cron Triggers, for schedulingCronjobs; and additional tooling for developers to deploy and scale their code across the globe.[50]

In 2020, Cloudflare released aJAMstackplatform for developers to deploy websites on Cloudflare's Edge infrastructure, under the name "Pages".[51]

In 2022, Cloudflare announced an EdgeSQLdatabase, D1, which is built onSQLite.[52]

In August 2023, Cloudflare andIBMannounced a partnership providing bot management capabilities to protect IBM Cloud customers from malicious bots and automated threats.[53]

Also in August 2023, Cloudflare was hired bySpaceXto boost the performance ofStarlink,[54]and in September launched Cloudflare Fonts as a competitor toGoogle Fonts.[55]

Internet security

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In April 2020, Cloudflare announced it was moving away from usingreCAPTCHAin favor ofhCaptcha.[56]In September 2022, Cloudflare began to test Turnstile – an alternative toCAPTCHA.The product, instead of presenting a visual CAPTCHA for the user to solve, automatizes the verification process by conducting JavaScript-based checks inside the browser to determine whether the user is a real person or an automated entity. The algorithm reportedly uses machine learning to optimize the process.[57]

Through a contract with theCybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency,Cloudflare provides registry and authoritative DNS services to the.govtop-level domain.[58]

In November 2020, Cloudflare announced Cloudflare for Teams, consisting of a DNS resolver and web gateway called "Gateway", and azero-trust authenticationservice called "Access".[59]

Cloudflare announced a partnership withPhonePein January 2023 to secure its mobile payment system.[60]In February, Cloudflare launched Wildebeest to allowMastodonusers to set up and run their own instances on Cloudflare's infrastructure.[61]

In August 2023, Cloudflare started the Project Cybersafe Schools program as part of a $20 million grant program fromAmazon Web Services,making 70 percent of public school districts in the United States eligible for no-cost cybersecurity services.[62]

In March 2024, they announced Firewall for AI to defend applications runninglarge language models(LLMs).[63]

SASE

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Cloudflare One, the company's overarchingSASEplatform, debuted in October 2020.[64]

Cloudflare One announced the acquisition ofArea 1 Securityin February 2022, a company who developed a product for combating phishing email attacks.[65]

Cloudflare One announced the acquisition of Nefeli Networks in March 2024, a cloud networking company co-founded by computer scientistSylvia Ratnasamy.

VPN

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In 2019, Cloudflare released aVPN servicecalledWARP,[66][67]and open sourced the custom underlyingWireGuard implementationwritten inRust.[68][69]

Other services

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In January 2021, the company began providing its "Waiting Room" digital queue product for free for COVID-19 vaccination scheduling under the title "Project Fair Shot".[70]Project Fair Shot later won aWebby People's Choice Awardin 2022 for Event Management under the Apps & Software category.[71]

In March 2023, Cloudflare announcedpost-quantum cryptographywill be made freely and forever available tocloud services,applications and Internet connections.[72]

Security and privacy issues

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Intrusions

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On June 1, 2012, the hacker groupUGNazicompromised some of Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince's accounts and redirected visitors of the website4chanto a Twitter account belonging to UGNazi. They allegedly usedsocial engineeringto trick AT&T support staff into giving them access to Prince's voicemail, then exploited a vulnerability in Cloudflare's use of Google's two-factor authentication system. Once in control of Prince's email account, UGNazi was able to redirect the 4chan domain through Cloudflare's database.[73][74]

2016-2017 data leak

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Further information:Cloudbleed

From September 2016 until February 2017, a major Cloudflare bug nicknamedCloudbleed[75]leaked sensitive data, including passwords and authentication tokens, from customer websites by sending extra data in response to web requests.[76]

Controversies

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Cloudflare has said that it has a content neutrality policy and that it opposes the policing of its customers onfree speechgrounds, except in cases where the customers break the law.[77][78]The company has faced criticism for not banning hate speech websites and websites allegedly connected to terrorism groups,[79]but Cloudflare has maintained that no law enforcement agency has asked the company to discontinue these services and it closely monitors its obligations under U.S. laws.[80]

In 2022, a research paper byStanford Universityfound that Cloudflare was a prominent CDN provider among several other providers that are disproportionately responsible for serving misinformation websites.[81][82]Cloudflare has come under pressure on multiple occasions due to its services being utilized to accessfar-rightcontent.[83][84][85][86]

Service terminations

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The Daily Stormer

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Cloudflare provided DNS routing and DDoS protection for thewhite supremacistandneo-Naziwebsite,The Daily Stormer.In 2017 Cloudflarestopped providing its servicestoThe Daily Stormerafter an announcement on the website asserted that the "upper echelons" of Cloudflare were "secretly supporters of their ideology".[87][88]

Previously, Cloudflare had refused to take any action regardingThe Daily Stormer.[86]Founder Matthew Prince said he found the website's content "vile", but regretted he alone could "decide its fate".[89]He toldBusiness Insider:"The ability of somebody to single-handedly choose to knock content offline doesn’t align with core ideas of due process or justice. Whether that’s a national government launching attacks or an individual launching attacks."[89]

As a self-described "free speech absolutist", Prince, in a blog post, vowed never to succumb to external pressure again and sought to create a "political umbrella" for the future.[86]Prince further addressed the dangers of large companies deciding what is allowed to stay online, a concern that is shared by a number of civil liberties groups and privacy experts.[90][91][92]TheElectronic Frontier Foundation,a US digital rights group, said that services such as Cloudflare "should not be adjudicating what speech is acceptable", adding that "when illegal activity, like inciting violence or defamation, occurs, the proper channel to deal with it is the legal system".[87]

Mass shootings and 8chan

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In 2019, Cloudflare was criticized for providing services to the far-right[93]discussion and imageboard8chan.The message board has been linked to mass shootings in the United States and theChristchurch mosque shootingsin New Zealand.[93][94][95]In addition, a number of news organizations includingThe Washington PostandThe Daily Dothave reported on the existence ofchild pornographyandchild sexual abusediscussion boards.[96][97][98]

A Cloudflare representative said that the platform "does not host the referenced websites, cannot block websites, and is not in the business of hiding companies that host illegal content".[99]Cloudflare did not terminate service to8chanuntil public and legal pressure mounted in the wake of the2019 El Paso shooting,in which the associated manifesto was published to 8chan.[100][101][102]In an interview withThe Guardianimmediately after the shooting, CEO Matthew Prince defended Cloudflare's support of 8chan, saying that he had a "moral obligation" to keep 8chan online.[103]

On August 5, 2019, Cloudflare terminated service to 8chan.[104]Following this, 8chan moved its forums from theclearnetto thedark web.[105]Cloudflare explained that 8chan "have proven themselves to be lawless and that lawlessness has caused multiple tragic deaths. Even if 8chan may not have violated the letter of the law in refusing to moderate their hate-filled community, they have created an environment that revels in violating its spirit."[106]Prince said that what happened in El Paso was "abhorrent in every possible way", removing 8chan from the Internet was "the right thing to do".[107][103]

Kiwi Farms

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See also:Kiwi Farms § Terminations of service

Cloudflare providedDDoS mitigationand acted as areverse proxyforKiwi Farms,a far-right[108][109]Internet forum dedicated to discussion andtrollingof online figures or communities. The site often engages in harassment anddox xingof targets[110]and has been implicated in thesuicides of at least three people.[111][112][113][114][115]Kiwi Farms also has a reputation fortransphobiccontent, and its users have been accused ofswattingvulnerable individuals.[116][117][118][119]Although Cloudflare was not the primary website host, they did perform critical services to keep Kiwi Farms on-line, both protecting the site fromdenial-of-service attacksandoptimizing content delivery.[120][5][121][122]

In 2022, a campaign was launched bytransgenderactivistClara Sorrenti,who has previously been targeted by the forum, to pressure Cloudflare into terminating service for Kiwi Farms.[123][124]Cloudflare responded by issuing a statement on its abuse policies and saying it didn't want to set precedent for speech on the internet with its "extraordinary" decision.[125]

The company also released a blog post[126]and likened their services to that of a public utility, stating that "Just as the telephone company doesn't terminate your line if you say awful, racist, bigoted things, we have concluded... that turning off security services because we think what you publish is despicable is the wrong policy", but that it would certainly be the "popular choice" to drop sites that the Cloudflare team "personally feels [are] disgusting and immoral".[127][128]The company also defended their decision by saying that "where they had provided DDoS protection services to an anti-LGBTIQ+ website, they donated 100% of the fees earned to an organisation fighting forLGBTIQ+rights ".[129]The blog post mentioned Cloudflare's terms of use agreement, which allows them to terminate service due to "content that discloses sensitive personal information, [and] incites or exploits violence against people" but, according toThe Guardian,the statement "did not specifically address how Kiwi Farms users dox xing people did not fall foul of these terms".[129]

On September 3, 2022, Cloudflare blocked Kiwi Farms, citing urgent escalating rhetoric against targets of Kiwi Farms, stating that there is an "unprecedented emergency and immediate threat to human life". According toThe Washington Post,there was a "surge in credible violent threats stemming from the site" and CEO Matthew Prince said that Cloudflare believes "there is an imminent danger, and the pace at which law enforcement is able to respond to those threats we don't think is fast enough to keep up".[130][131][132]

Switter

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Switter was a social media network for thesex workercommunity, built by Australia-based company Assembly Four onMastodon's open-source software, before Cloudflare dropped Switter as a client and ceased services in April 2018, citing terms of service violations.[133][134]This occurred shortly after the passage ofFOSTA/SESTA,a set of bills criminalizing websites that "facilitate or supportsex trafficking"in 2018. SESTAweakened protections for Internet infrastructure companiesand wascriticized on free speech groundsdue to concerns about disproportionate impact and disruptions to the lives of sex workers.[135][136][137]

Cloudflare said the move was "related to our attempts to understandFOSTA,which is a very bad law and [sets] a very dangerous precedent ".[138]Assembly Four said that "Given Cloudflare's previous stances of privacy and freedom, as well as fighting alongside theEFF,we had hoped they would take a stand against FOSTA/SESTA ".[133]

Terrorism

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In 2015, testimony to theUnited States House Committee on Foreign Affairs,it was reported that two of the top three online chat forums and nearly forty other web sites belonging to theIslamic State of Iraq and the Levant(ISIL) were guarded by Cloudflare.[139]

In 2018,The Huffington Postdocumented that Cloudflare provided services for "at least 7 terrorist groups", as designated by theUnited States Department of StateincludingAl-Shabaab,theTaliban,thePopular Front for the Liberation of Palestine,theal-Quds Brigades,theKurdistan Workers' Party(PKK), theal-Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades,andHamas.[140][113]At the time, Cloudflare's general counsel, Doug Kramer, told The Huffington Post that he couldn't comment on specific cases in which Cloudflare was told about possible terrorist organizations using its services, but that Cloudflare does work with government agencies to be in compliance with its legal obligations.[113]

In September 2019, Cloudflare reported in theirForm S-1filing that their technology was "used by, or for the benefit of, certain individuals or entities" that were blacklisted due to United States economic and trade sanctions regulations ",[141]including "entities identified in OFAC’s counter-terrorism and counter-narcotics trafficking sanctions programs, or affiliated with governments currently subject to comprehensive U.S. sanctions".[142]

Crime

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Cloudflare has been cited in reports byThe Spamhaus Project,an internationalspamtracking organization, for the high numbers of cybercriminal botnet operations hosted by Cloudflare.[143][144][145]An October 2015 report found that Cloudflare provisioned 40% of theSSL certificatesused bytyposquattingphishingsites, which use deceptive domain names resembling those of banks and payment processors to compromise Internet users' banking and other transactions.[146]Cloudflare has been criticized for having aconflict of interestby providing DDoS protection to both the operators and victims of "stresser"services.[147][148]

In 2018, Cloudflare was identified by the European Union's Counterfeit and Piracy Watch List as a "notorious market"which engages in, facilitates, or benefits from counterfeiting and piracy. The report noted that Cloudflare hides and anonymizes the operators of 40% of the world's pirate sites, and 62% of the 500 largest such sites, and" does not follow due diligence when opening accounts for websites to prevent illegal sites from using its services ".[149][150]

In 2020, an Italian court ruled Cloudflare had to block current and future domain names and IP addresses of the pirate IPTV service "IPTV THE BEST" for infringing on LegaSerie Aintellectual property.[151]At the time, Cloudflare was already blocking 22 domain names in Italy.[152]German courts have similarly found that "Cloudflare and its anonymization services attract structurally copyright infringing websites."[153]

Response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine

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AfterRussia invaded Ukrainein late February 2022,UkrainianVice Prime Minister, Minister of Digital TransformationMykhailo Fedorov[154]and others[155]called on Cloudflare to stop providing its services in theRussianmarket amidst reports that Russia-linked websites spreading disinformation were using the company's content delivery network services.[156]Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince responded that the company decided to remain providing services to Russian people to counter Russia's attempts to raise a 'digital iron curtain'.[157][158]Prince shared that "Indiscriminately terminating service would do little to harm the Russian government but would both limit [Russian citizens'] access to information outside the country and make significantly more vulnerable those who have used us to shield themselves as they have criticized the government."[159]The company later said it had minimal sales and commercial activity in Russia and had "terminated any customers we have identified as tied to sanctioned entities".[160]

Cloudflare's Project Galileo, launched in 2014, offersDDoSprotection toNGOsfor free. In 2022, they extended free protection toUkrainian governmentand telecoms.[161][162]

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