Product Code Database
Cloudflare, Inc., is an American company that provides content delivery network services, cybersecurity, DDoS mitigation, wide area network services, Reverse proxy, Domain Name Service, ICANN-accredited domain registration, and other services. Cloudflare's headquarters are in San Francisco, California. According to W3Techs, Cloudflare is used by around 19.3% of all websites on the Internet for its web security services,
In 2020, Cloudflare co-founder and COO Michelle Zatlyn was named president, making her one of the few female presidents of a publicly traded technology company in the U.S.
Cloudflare has acquired web-services and security companies, including StopTheHacker (February 2014), CryptoSeal (June 2014), Eager Platform Co. (December 2016), Neumob (November 2017), S2 Systems (January 2020), Linc (December 2020), Zaraz (December 2021), Vectrix (February 2022), Area 1 Security (February 2022), Nefeli Networks (March 2024), BastionZero (May 2024), and Kivera (October 2024).
Since at least 2017, Cloudflare has been using a wall of in their San Francisco headquarters as a source of randomness for encryption keys, alongside in its London offices and a geiger counter in its Singapore offices. The lava lamp installation implements the Lavarand method, where a camera transforms the unpredictable shapes of the "lava" blobs into a digital image.
Cloudflare provided paid services to 162,086 customers.
As of 2024, Cloudflare servers are powered by AMD Epyc 9684X processors.
Cloudflare also provides analysis and reports on large-scale outages, including Verizon’s October 2024 outage.
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.The company also launched an AI assistant to generate charts based on queries by leveraging Workers AI.Cloudflare announced plans in September 2024 to launch a marketplace where website owners can sell AI model providers access to scrape their site’s content.Cloudflare also launched AI Audit, which provides analytics on AI models scraping their sites (along with the ability to block them altogether).
In March 2025, Cloudflare announced a new feature called AI Labyrinth, which combats unauthorized AI data scraping by serving fake AI-generated content to LLM bots.
In March 2013, The Spamhaus Project was targeted by a DDoS attack that Cloudflare reported exceeded 300gigabits per second (Gbit/s). Patrick Gilmore, of Akamai, 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.
In 2014, Cloudflare began providing free DDoS mitigation for artists, activists, journalists, and human rights groups under the name "Project Galileo". In 2017, they extended the service to electoral infrastructure and political campaigns under the name "Athenian Project". By 2020, more than 1,000 users and organizations were participating in Project Galileo, including 31 US states.
In February 2014, Cloudflare claimed to have mitigated an NTP reflection attack against an unnamed European customer, which they stated peaked at 400 Gbit/s. In November 2014, it reported a 500 Gbit/s DDoS attack in Hong Kong. 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 1.2 Tbit/s in total. 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".
Cloudflare blocked the largest publicly recorded DDoS attack in October 2024, with volumetric attacks peaking at 5.6 terabits per second.
In 2020, Cloudflare released a JAMstack platform for developers to deploy websites on Cloudflare's Edge infrastructure, under the name "Pages".
In 2022, Cloudflare announced an Edge SQL database, D1, which is built on SQLite.
In August 2023, Cloudflare and IBM announced a partnership providing bot management capabilities to protect IBM Cloud customers from malicious bots and automated threats.
Also in August 2023, Cloudflare was hired by SpaceX to boost the performance of Starlink, and in September launched Cloudflare Fonts as a competitor to Google Fonts.
Through a contract with the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, Cloudflare provides registry and authoritative DNS services to the .gov top-level domain.
In November 2020, Cloudflare announced Cloudflare for Teams, consisting of a DNS resolver and web gateway called "Gateway", and a zero-trust authentication service called "Access".
Cloudflare announced a partnership with PhonePe in January 2023 to secure its mobile payment system. In February, Cloudflare launched Wildebeest to allow Mastodon users to set up and run their own instances on Cloudflare's infrastructure.
In August 2023, Cloudflare started the Project Cybersafe Schools program as part of a $20 million grant program from Amazon Web Services, making 70 percent of public school districts in the United States eligible for no-cost cybersecurity services.
In March 2024, they announced Firewall for AI to defend applications running large language models (LLMs).In September, Cloudflare announced Ephemeral IDs, which identifies fraudulent activity by linking behavior to a client through a short-lived, generated ID, rather than the traditional means of using an IP address.The same month, the company also announced all ISP and equipment manufacturers could use their DNS resolvers for free.
Cloudflare introduced the Cloudforce One threat events platform in March 2025, offering real-time insights into cyberattacks using data gathered from Cloudflare's network.
Cloudflare announced the acquisition of Area 1 Security in February 2022, a company who developed a product designed to combat phishing email attacks.
Cloudflare acquired Nefeli Networks in March 2024, a cloud networking company, co-founded by computer scientist Sylvia Ratnasamy.
In March 2023, Cloudflare announced post-quantum cryptography will be made freely and forever available to , applications and Internet connections.
Cloudflare released the Speed Brain and Instant Purge features in September 2024, to significantly reduce page load latency by prefetching content, and invalidating cached content in under 150ms.
In 2024, Cloudflare announced plans to launch a new payment method, called Stripe Link, which went into beta in the fall.
In 2022, a research paper by Stanford University found that Cloudflare was a prominent CDN provider among several other providers that are disproportionately responsible for serving misinformation websites. Cloudflare has come under pressure on multiple occasions due to its services being utilized to access far-right content.
Previously, Cloudflare had refused to take any action regarding The Daily Stormer. Founder Matthew Prince said he found the website's content "vile", but regretted he alone could "decide its fate". He told Business 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."
As a self-described "free speech absolutist", Prince claimed he did not want to repeat the decision, and sought out protections for the company should they be faced with a similar situation in the future. 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. The Electronic 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".
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". Cloudflare did not terminate service to 8chan until public and legal pressure mounted in the wake of the 2019 El Paso shooting, in which the associated manifesto was published to 8chan. In an interview with The Guardian immediately after the shooting, CEO Matthew Prince defended Cloudflare's support of 8chan, saying that he had a "moral obligation" to keep 8chan online.
On August 5, 2019, Cloudflare terminated service to 8chan. Following this, 8chan moved its forums from the clearnet to the dark web. 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." 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".
In 2022, a campaign was launched by transgender activist Clara Sorrenti, who has previously been targeted by the forum, to pressure Cloudflare into terminating service for Kiwi Farms. 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.
The company also released a blog post and likened their services to that of a public utility, emphasizing that they do not believe in shutting down security services based on content they find objectionable. They acknowledged that while it might be more popular to remove sites that the Cloudflare team finds offensive, they stood by their decision not to do so. The company also defended their decision by saying that they donated all earnings from anti-LGBTQ sites to an organization that advocated for LGBTIQ+ rights. 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 to The Guardian, the statement did not address how Kiwi Farms users' doxxing behavior did not violate these terms.
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 to The 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".
Cloudflare said the move was "related to our attempts to understand FOSTA-SESTA, which is a very bad law and sets a very dangerous precedent". Assembly Four said that "Given Cloudflare's previous stances of privacy and freedom, as well as fighting alongside the EFF, we had hoped they would take a stand against FOSTA/SESTA".
In 2018, HuffPost documented that Cloudflare provided services for "at least 7 terrorist groups", as designated by the United States Department of State including Al-Shabaab, the Taliban, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, the al-Quds Brigades, the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), the al-Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades, and Hamas. 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.
In September 2019, Cloudflare reported in their Form S-1 filing 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", 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".
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".
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 Lega Serie A intellectual property. At the time, Cloudflare was already blocking 22 domain names in Italy. German courts have similarly found that "Cloudflare and its anonymization services attract structurally copyright infringing websites."
Following the December 2024 court ruling, the Spanish LaLiga requested that telephone operators block Cloudflare's IP address ranges in February 2025. Cloudflare hosted websites that illegally broadcast soccer matches. As a result, the pirate platform DuckVision was shut down before the derby between Real Madrid and Atlético Madrid. The platform had 200,000 users and was backed by Cloudflare. The blocks affected major websites, including X, Vimeo, Steam, GitHub, and the Real Academia de la Lengua Española.
Cloudflare's Project Galileo, launched in 2014, offers DDoS protection to for free. In 2022, they extended free protection to Ukrainian government and telecoms.
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