Description
Cloudflare is an American web infrastructure and website security company that provides content delivery network and DDoS mitigation services. Cloudflare's services sit between a website's visitor and the Cloudflare customer's hosting provider, acting as a reverse proxy for websites. Cloudflare's headquarters are in San Francisco.
History
Cloudflare was created in 2009 by Matthew Prince, Lee Holloway, and Michelle Zatlyn, all three of whom previously worked on Project Honey Pot, an open-source project that monitored internet fraud and abuse. Cloudflare was launched at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference in September 2010. It received media attention in June 2011 for providing security services to the website of LulzSec, a black hat hacking group. From 2009, the company was venture-capital funded. On August 15, 2019, Cloudflare submitted its S-1 filing for IPO on the New York Stock Exchange under the stock ticker NET. It opened for public trading on September 13, 2019, priced at $15 per share.
In February 2014, Cloudflare mitigated what was at the time the largest ever recorded DDoS attack, which peaked at 400 Gigabits per second against an undisclosed customer. In November 2014, Cloudflare reported another massive DDoS attack with independent media sites being targeted at 500 Gbit/s. In March 2013, the company defended The Spamhaus Project from a DDoS attack that exceeded 300 Gbit/s. Akamai's chief architect stated that at the time it was "the largest publicly announced DDoS attack in the history of the Internet". Cloudflare has also reportedly absorbed attacks that have peaked over 400Gbit/s from an NTP Reflection attack. In June 2020, Cloudflare mitigated a DDoS attack that peaked at 754 million packets per second. As of 2020, Cloudflare provides DNS services to over 100,000 customers, covering more than 25 million internet properties.
In 2014, Cloudflare launched Project Galileo, an initiative providing free services to protect artists, activists, journalists, and human rights groups from cyber attacks. More than 1,000 users and organizations were participating in Project Galileo as of 2020.
In 2017, Cloudflare created the Athenian Project to ensure free protection of online election infrastructures to local and state governments, as well as domestic and foreign political campaigns.
On April 1, 2019, Cloudflare announced a new freemium VPN service named WARP. The service would initially be available through the 1.1.1.1 mobile apps with a desktop app available later. On September 25, 2019, Cloudflare released WARP to the public. The beta for macOS and Windows was announced on April 1, 2020.
On September 6, 2019, Wikipedia became the victim of a DDoS attack. European users were unable to access Wikipedia for several hours. The attack was mitigated after Wikimedia network engineers used Cloudflare's network and DDoS protection services to re-route and filter internet traffic. The specific Cloudflare product used was Magic Transit.
In 2020, co-founder and COO Michelle Zatlyn was named president, making her one of the few women serving as president of a publicly traded technology company in the United States.
In January 2021, the company established the Project Fair Shot initiative, a free tool that enables global health organizations to maintain a digital queue for COVID-19 vaccinations.
