Cloudflare

Cloudflare is an American internet infrastructure and security company founded in 2009 by Matthew Prince, Lee Holloway, and Michelle Zatlyn. Its first product, launched in 2010, helped websites identify and block malicious traffic while also improving performance through a global network of data centers. The company was created after Prince and Holloway worked on Project Honey Pot, an open-source effort that collected information about abusive internet activity. Cloudflare’s network sits between users and millions of internet properties, providing services that include content delivery, distributed denial-of-service protection, web application security, authoritative DNS, domain registration, and developer infrastructure. Its DNS resolver, 1.1.1.1, launched in 2018 in partnership with APNIC. The service was designed to offer a fast, privacy-focused public DNS alternative, and Cloudflare later added encrypted DNS support through DNS over HTTPS and DNS over TLS. The company became publicly traded on the New York Stock Exchange in September 2019 under the symbol NET. Its public offering followed rapid expansion from a website-security provider into a broader connectivity platform. Cloudflare Workers, introduced in 2017, lets developers run JavaScript and other supported code at Cloudflare’s edge rather than relying exclusively on centralized servers. The product became a foundation for edge-computing applications, APIs, and serverless workloads. Cloudflare has also launched products aimed at replacing traditional corporate network architectures. Cloudflare One combines services such as Zero Trust access, secure web gateways, and network connectivity. In 2020, the company introduced Cloudflare for Teams, later associated with the Cloudflare One product family, to help organizations control access to internal applications without placing users on conventional private networks. A notable part of Cloudflare’s public role is its response to large-scale attacks and internet outages. The company has repeatedly reported mitigating record-setting DDoS campaigns, including attacks involving vulnerable servers and botnets. It also publishes transparency information about government requests and describes policies concerning customers whose websites face political or legal controversy. Cloudflare’s decisions in cases such as The Daily Stormer in 2017 prompted debate over intermediary responsibility, free expression, and the power of infrastructure providers. Today, Cloudflare operates a global network and serves customers ranging from individual developers to large enterprises. Its history is marked by a steady expansion from caching and attack mitigation toward DNS, edge computing, zero-trust security, and programmable internet services. That evolution has made Cloudflare an important, and sometimes controversial, intermediary in the modern web.