Cloudflare

Extracted Attributes

• Founded

  2009-11-01

• Founders

  Matthew Prince, Lee Holloway, Michelle Zatlyn

• Headquarters

  San Francisco, California, United States

• Market Share

  21.3% of all websites (as of January 2026)

• Stock Ticker

  NET (NYSE)

• Core Services

  CDN, DDoS mitigation, Cloud Cybersecurity, Domain Registration

• Employee Count

  2440

• Consumer Products

  1.1.1.1 (DNS), WARP (VPN)

Timeline

• Cloudflare is founded by Matthew Prince, Lee Holloway, and Michelle Zatlyn. (Source: Wikidata)

  2009-11-01

• The Spamhaus Project reports that Cloudflare provisioned 40% of SSL certificates used by phishing sites. (Source: Wikipedia)

  2015-10-01

• Cloudflare goes public on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol NET. (Source: Wikipedia)

  2019-09-13

• Cloudflare announces 'Cloudflare for Teams', including DNS resolver 'Gateway' and zero-trust service 'Access'. (Source: Wikipedia)

  2020-11-01

• Cloudflare releases Privacy Gateway, an Oblivious HTTP relay service. (Source: Wikipedia)

  2022-01-01

• Cloudflare loses a major lawsuit against Japanese publishers regarding copyright infringement. (Source: Wikipedia)

  2025-01-01

• The company experiences significant global outages disrupting major international platforms. (Source: Wikipedia)

  2025-11-01

• Cloudflare is reported to be used by 21.3% of all websites on the internet. (Source: Wikipedia)

  2026-01-01

Cloudflare

Cloudflare, Inc. is an American technology company headquartered in San Francisco, California, that provides a range of internet services, including content delivery network (CDN) services, cloud cybersecurity, DDoS mitigation, and ICANN-accredited domain registration. The company's services act primarily as a reverse proxy between website visitors and a customer's hosting provider, improving performance and protecting against malicious traffic. Cloudflare was founded in 2009 by Matthew Prince, Lee Holloway, and Michelle Zatlyn. The company went public on the New York Stock Exchange in 2019 under the ticker symbol NET. Cloudflare has since expanded its offerings to include edge computing through its Workers platform, a public DNS resolver (1.1.1.1), and a VPN service known as WARP. In recent years, the company has integrated artificial intelligence into its infrastructure, acquiring companies such as Replicate and launching tools to manage AI bots and scrapers. According to W3Techs, Cloudflare is used by approximately 21.3% of all websites on the Internet as of January 2026. The company has been the subject of controversy regarding its policy of content neutrality. While Cloudflare executives have historically advocated for remaining a neutral infrastructure provider, the company has terminated services for specific high-profile websites associated with hate speech and violence, including The Daily Stormer, 8chan, and Kiwi Farms, following significant public pressure. Cloudflare has also faced criticism and litigation regarding copyright infringement by websites using its services, notably losing a lawsuit against Japanese publishers in 2025. The company experienced significant global outages in late 2025 which disrupted services for major platforms internationally.

Web Search Results

• Cloudflare Product Portfolio

  Cloudflare provides a comprehensive, cloud-based network-as-a-service solution that is designed to be secure, fast, reliable, and define the future of the corporate network. Whereas some large companies had built their own proprietary networks to control and protect their employees working in virtual space, that model had significant limitations, including a price tag that was prohibitive for most companies and an inability to adapt well to increased use of mobile devices and remote work. By leveraging the public Internet, Cloudflare brings together in a single pane of glass how employees connect, on-ramps for branch offices, secure connectivity for applications, and controlled access to SaaS. Broadly speaking, the Cloudflare internal infrastructure solution has two components: (i) [...] Developer-based solutions Consumer offerings Cloudflare for External-Facing Infrastructure Cloudflare offers a suite of products to help ensure that external-facing infrastructure (such as websites, applications, and APIs) that are exposed to the Internet are safe from attack, fast, and reliable. Security We provide an integrated cloud-based security solution designed to secure any combination of platforms, including public cloud, private cloud, onpremise, SaaS applications, and IoT devices. Performance Our performance solutions improve conversions, reduce churn, and improve visitor experiences by accelerating web and mobile performance, while keeping applications available. [...] #### Cloudflare Pages® Cloudflare Pages allows frontend developers to quickly and easily build, collaborate on, and deploy websites. #### Cloudflare Registrar Offers secure registration and management of domain names. #### Cloudflare’s Security Operations Center (SOC) as a Service Cloudflare’s Security Operations Center (SOC)-as-a-Service is designed to meet the security monitoring, threat detection and incident response needs of enterprises of all sizes and sophistication, across Layer 3, Layer 4, and Layer 7. The SOC combines our award-winning best-in-class security products, next-generation detection and alerting platform and 24x7x365 assistance from our network security engineers. #### Cloudflare Spectrum

• What is Cloudflare? - Mashable

  ## What is Cloudflare? Cloudflare is an internet infrastructure and cloud computing provider that functions similarly to Amazon Web Services. The company hosts numerous online services, but it's best known as a global Content Delivery Network, which speeds up websites by routing them through servers located closer to users. In practice, Cloudflare acts as a giant internet middleman — the thing that makes a U.S.-hosted site load quickly even if you're browsing from halfway around the world. Mashable Light Speed Want more out-of-this world tech, space and science stories? Sign up for Mashable's weekly Light Speed newsletter. By clicking Sign Me Up, you confirm you are 16+ and agree to our Terms of Use") and Privacy Policy"). Thanks for signing up! You May Also Like --- [...] Thanks for signing up! You May Also Like --- Cloudflare has servers everywhere, and they can cache a huge amount of content. That allows the company to spread traffic across thousands of nodes — individual servers in Cloudflare’s global network — each capable of handling a high volume of requests on its own without passing everything back to the original server. It keeps sites from getting slammed all at once and reduces the chances of an overload. [...] Your local Cloudflare node is also almost always several hops closer than the server where the site is actually hosted. A hop is just one step in the journey your data takes as it moves through the internet. Fewer hops mean less distance and less time waiting for information to move between points. That shorter path translates to lower latency and faster overall load times. Related Stories Cloudflare down: What we know about the outage so far Cloudflare launches way to charge AI bots for crawling sites Cloudflare outage list: X, OpenAI, Canva, Spotify, more impacted Cloudflare just faced a self-inflicted DDoS-like outage from API bug it coded itself

• Cloudflare - Wikipedia

  In 2018, The Huffington Post documented that Cloudflare provided services for "at least 7 terrorist groups", as designated by the United States Department of State including Al-Shabaab "Al-Shabaab (militant group)"), 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. [...] Through a contract with the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, Cloudflare provides registry and authoritative DNS services to the .gov top-level domain. Cloudflare also launched Cloudflare for Campaigns in 2020, to offer free cybersecurity tools to political campaigns.Those tools expanded to include secure email systems in 2025. 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 released an Oblivious HTTP relay service in 2022, called Privacy Gateway. [...] ### Crime [edit] Cloudflare has been cited in reports by The Spamhaus Project, an international spam tracking organization, for the high numbers of cybercriminal botnet operations hosted by Cloudflare. An October 2015 report found that Cloudflare provisioned 40% of the SSL certificates used by typosquatting phishing sites, which use deceptive domain names resembling those of banks and payment processors to compromise Internet users' banking and other transactions. Cloudflare has been criticized for having a conflict of interest by providing DDoS protection to both the operators and victims of "stresser" services.

• What is Cloudflare & why you should use it for your website - Devlane

  Cloudflare provides a DNS service that is entirely free. With its enormous edge network availability worldwide, Cloudflare provides a free content delivery network (CDN). It provides a free SSL certificate, which allows you to convert an HTTP website to an HTTPS compatible webpage in seconds. Cloudflare provides DDoS protection for free. It provides free content caching, which speeds up page loading times. It includes a firewall service that is included in the Cloudflare free plan. You can use this to block bots, traffic from specified countries, and IP addresses, among other things. It makes it simple to export and import DNS settings. [...] Cloudflare is on a mission to make the Internet a better place. Cloudflare is one of the largest networks in the world. Thanks to Cloudflare, businesses, non-profits, bloggers and anybody with an online presence now have quicker, more secure websites and apps. Millions of websites use Cloudflare, and our network is growing by tens of thousands every day. Cloudflare serves 32 million HTTP requests per second on average and powers Internet requests for millions of websites. ## Features of Cloudflare Defend (DDoS) attack: Cloudflare protects websites, applications, and entire networks from DDoS attacks, blocking over 57 billion assaults per day. [...] Multiple Authors July 10, 2025 ## What is Cloudflare? Cloudflare is a Content Delivery Network (CDN) (CDN). Cloudflare is a firm that provides CDNs, web security, and other services. Cloudflare's main goal is to assist small and large enterprises in securing and speeding up their internet assets. It was founded in 2009 with the goal of locating and eradicating the source of email spam. It has evolved over time and today serves millions of consumers with DNS and security services. It is now one of the largest cloud network platforms, with over 12 million domains trusting it. Furthermore, it is responsible for roughly 10% of all internet traffic. We look at how Cloudflare works and the primary advantages of adopting it for your company.

• So what is Cloudflare?

  Sign up # So what is Cloudflare? Cloudflare is one of the biggest networks operating on the Internet. People use Cloudflare services for the purposes of increasing the security and performance of their web sites and services. #### Learning Objectives After reading this article you will be able to: Understand how Cloudflare works Related Content What is web application security?What is TLS?OSI ModelWhat is a DDoS botnet?What is Serverless? #### Want to keep learning? Subscribe to theNET, Cloudflare's monthly recap of the Internet's most popular insights! Copy article link ## So what is Cloudflare? Cloudflare is on a mission to help build a better Internet. [...] Cloudflare is one of the world’s largest networks. Today, businesses, non-profits, bloggers, and anyone with an Internet presence boast faster, more secure websites and apps thanks to Cloudflare. Millions of Internet properties are on Cloudflare, and our network is growing by tens of thousands each day. Cloudflare powers Internet requests for millions of websites and serves 81 million HTTP requests per second on average. Regain control with the Connectivity Cloud Learn more Everywhere security for every phase of the attack lifecycle Read the ebook #### Here’s how it works: In the early days of the Internet, when you wanted to load a website, your request would go from your computer to a server, which would then return the web page you requested. Sign Up

• Image

  

• Country

  United States

• Founder

  Matthew Prince

• Employees

  2,440

• Instance Of

  Q72588

• Headquarters

  San Francisco

• Inception Date

  11/1/2009