Global Network Expansion

7/24/2026

This post details an investigation into the manipulation of the BGP ORIGIN attribute, revealing that approximately 70% of observed paths have a different ORIGIN value than what was set by the originating Autonomous System. The analysis used BGPKIT and MRT dumps from RIPE RIS and RouteViews, along with internal BMP data, to identify ASes that rewrite the ORIGIN attribute, primarily to IGP, to influence route selection and divert traffic. The study found significant manipulation in both IPv4 and IPv6 routing, with nearly 10% of direct peers rewriting the ORIGIN to IGP for IPv4. The findings highlight the revenue-driven nature of BGP route selection and the widespread deviation from RFC standards.

6/3/2026

This post details an investigation into route hijacks facilitated by forged BGP AS PATHs. It analyzes specific hijack examples, explains the vulnerabilities in BGP related to First AS checking, and proposes the enforcement of First AS matching the peer AS as a critical security measure. The post also describes an experiment where Cloudflare intentionally violated the First AS rule to measure its acceptance on the internet.

5/27/2026

This post leverages Cloudflare Radar data to analyze and confirm the partial restoration of internet access in Iran following a prolonged national shutdown. It details the timeline of two distinct shutdowns, analyzes traffic and DNS query increases as indicators of restoration, and highlights regional and network-specific traffic patterns. The post also notes the continued impact on IPv6 connectivity while IPv4 remains relatively stable, suggesting specific technical means were used for the shutdown.

4/28/2026

This post details observed internet disruptions in Q1 2026, categorizing them by cause: government-directed shutdowns (Uganda, Iran, Republic of Congo), military action (Ukraine, AWS Middle East), power outages (Cuba), severe weather (Portugal), cable damage (Republic of Congo), and technical problems (Verizon Wireless, Guinea, UK). It provides specific data points on traffic drops, IP address space changes, and the duration of these disruptions, illustrating the impact on global connectivity and Cloudflare's network monitoring capabilities.

4/17/2026

This post details Cloudflare's network performance improvements, showing an increase from being the fastest network in 40% to 60% of the top 1,000 networks globally by December 2025. It explains the methodology for measuring performance using connection time and Real User Measurements (RUM), and highlights that improvements are due to both new point-of-presence deployments and software optimizations in connection handling, HTTP/3, and congestion window management. The post also provides specific data on improvements in countries like the United States and details the average latency reduction compared to competitors.

4/10/2026

This post details Cloudflare's journey to 500 Tbps of network capacity, highlighting the evolution from early transit and peering to a global distributed platform. It explains the technical implementation of DDoS mitigation using eBPF and `dosd`, the role of Quicksilver for global rule propagation, and the integration of Workers and Durable Objects at the edge. It also discusses the adoption of IPv6, RPKI, and ASPA for network security and the challenges of distinguishing AI traffic from attacks using TLS fingerprinting and behavioral analysis.

2/27/2026

This post introduces ASPA (Autonomous System Provider Authorization) as a new cryptographic standard to enhance BGP security by validating the entire path of network traffic, building upon RPKI. Cloudflare Radar has launched a new feature to monitor ASPA deployment trends. The post details how ASPA works, its validation process, its effectiveness against forged-origin hijacks (with noted limitations), and the ease of creating ASPA objects within RIRs like RIPE and ARIN. This directly contributes to the network's security and reliability by addressing a critical challenge in internet routing.

2/21/2026

This post details a significant outage on February 20, 2026, caused by a misconfiguration in the Bring Your Own IP (BYOIP) service. A change intended to automate the removal of prefixes from the BYOIP pipeline contained a bug that led to the unintentional withdrawal of approximately 1,100 customer prefixes from the Cloudflare network. This resulted in services and applications being unreachable for affected customers. The post outlines the impact on various services, the root cause related to the Addressing API and a faulty cleanup sub-task, the limitations of staging environments and testing in catching this specific bug, and the challenges in immediate recovery due to different states of impact. It also highlights the ongoing 'Code Orange: Fail Small' initiative aimed at improving deployment safety and rollback capabilities.

1/26/2026

This post details observed internet disruptions in Q4 2025, categorizing them by cause: government-directed shutdowns, cable cuts (Digicel Haiti, Cybernet/StormFiber Pakistan, Camtel/MTN/Orange Cameroon, Claro Dominicana), power outages (Dominican Republic, Kenya), military action (Odesa, Ukraine), and technical problems. It quantifies the impact of these events on traffic and announced IP address space, leveraging Cloudflare Radar data and external reports to provide a comprehensive overview of global internet stability during the quarter.

1/23/2026

This post details a specific incident of a BGP route leak caused by an automated routing policy configuration error in the Miami data center. It explains the technical cause of the leak (a permissive policy matching 'internal' route types and advertising them externally), the impact (25 minutes of congestion, elevated loss, higher latency, discarded traffic), and the timeline of detection and resolution. It also provides technical details on BGP route leak definitions and analysis using tools like monocle and RIPE BGPlay.

1/6/2026

This post analyzes a BGP route leak anomaly observed in Venezuela, attributing it to potential insufficient routing export and import policies by the ISP CANTV (AS8048). It explains BGP and route leaks, details the specific leak involving AS8048 redistributing routes from AS6762 to AS52320, and discusses the relationship between AS8048 and the originating network AS21980. The post contrasts the observed leak with potential malicious intent, suggesting configuration errors or network issues as more likely causes, and highlights the role of tools like Cloudflare Radar and BGPKIT's monocle in analyzing such events. It also touches upon RFC9234 and the Only-to-Customer (OTC) attribute as potential solutions for preventing route leaks.

10/31/2025

This post details the formation and impact of BGP zombies and excessive path hunting, explaining how route withdrawals can lead to temporary routing loops and reachability issues. It describes the underlying causes, including router software bugs, processing slowness, and the Minimum Route Advertisement Interval (MRAI). The post also illustrates how Cloudflare's BYOIP on-demand advertisement feature can increase the frequency of these events and presents observed instances of BGP zombies within upstream partners and Cloudflare's own network. It highlights the longer convergence times observed for IPv4 compared to IPv6.

10/28/2025

This post introduces a data-driven framework for measuring Internet resilience, defining it as the measurable capability of a national or regional network ecosystem to maintain diverse and secure routing paths and rapidly restore connectivity. It highlights the importance of local decisions having global impact, the role of route hygiene (RPKI/ROV) in network health, and the challenges of measuring resilience due to data access limitations. The post details metrics related to IXPs and colocation facilities, emphasizing their role in local and global interconnection, and the need for diverse peering participation.

10/27/2025

This post announces a week-long series of blog posts from Cloudflare Research and friends, focusing on internet measurement, resilience, and transparency. It highlights upcoming content on foundational internet measurement concepts, Cloudflare Radar's evolution, and the workings of their internet speed test. It also details plans to introduce a framework for internet resilience, discuss post-quantum cryptography advancements, and explore network characteristics at Cloudflare scale. The post emphasizes the role of cryptographic protocols in securing interactions with AI agents and crawlers, building upon Web Bot Auth and proposing new protocols for honest users.

9/26/2025

This post introduces Cloudflare Radar's new feature for monitoring AS-SETs, which are crucial for BGP routing and building route filters. It explains how AS-SETs are used to group related networks, their current trust-based limitations, and the upcoming ASPA standard. The post details how accurate AS-SETs prevent route leaks, highlights AS-SET misuse, and showcases the new Radar feature that provides transparent, public listings of AS-SET information, including inferred ASN, IRR sources, member counts, and AS cone sizes, to help network operators monitor and manage their routing configurations.

9/26/2025

This post introduces significant enhancements to Cloudflare Radar, extending its visibility into Internet traffic and security. It adds regional traffic insights, allowing for more localized analysis of trends, and integrates detailed Certificate Transparency (CT) data, building upon Cloudflare's existing work in this area. These additions provide deeper, more granular visibility into the health and security of the Internet at both sub-national and cryptographic levels.

8/22/2025

This post details a network congestion incident caused by a single customer's traffic surge overwhelming links between Cloudflare and AWS us-east-1. It explains the technical details of the congestion, including the role of BGP prefix withdrawals by AWS, saturated peering connections, and overloaded Data Center Interconnect (DCI) links. It also outlines short-term remediations like traffic deprioritization, expedited DCI upgrades, and improved BGP traffic engineering with AWS, as well as a long-term solution involving a per-customer traffic management system.

6/27/2025

This post details how Russian ISPs are throttling and blocking internet access for users within Russia, impacting services protected by Cloudflare. It provides data analysis of traffic trends, Network Error Logging (NEL) reports, and packet loss to demonstrate the throttling mechanisms. The post highlights Cloudflare's inability to restore access due to the actions being outside of its control and condemns attempts to restrict internet access.

5/21/2025

This post introduces a new real-time BGP route lookup service on Cloudflare Radar, accessible via both a web interface and an API. This service provides near-instantaneous visualizations of BGP routes for IP prefixes, including Sankey diagrams and detailed origin tables with RPKI validation status. The accompanying API allows developers to programmatically access this data for automated tools, enhancing capabilities for BGP leak and hijack detection. The feature leverages data from RIPE RIS Live and RouteViews to reduce data delay from minutes to seconds, significantly improving the ability to monitor and debug internet routing.

4/28/2025

This post details how Cloudflare's extensive network allowed it to observe and analyze the impact of a major power outage in Portugal and Spain on internet traffic, network quality, and routing. It provides granular data on traffic drops at country, network, and regional levels, as well as changes in download speeds, latency, and announced IP address space, demonstrating the network's resilience and visibility during large-scale disruptions.

1/21/2025

This post analyzes the impact of the US ban on TikTok on DNS traffic, detailing the timeline of service disruption and restoration. It highlights how Cloudflare's 1.1.1.1 DNS resolver and autonomous system data provided real-time insights into the traffic drop and subsequent recovery. The post also details the surge in DNS traffic for TikTok alternatives like RedNote (Xiaohongshu) in the US and globally, showcasing Cloudflare's ability to track shifts in internet usage patterns due to geopolitical events and regulatory actions.

1/3/2025

This post introduces Multi-Path TCP (MPTCP) as a significant advancement in internet connectivity, building upon Cloudflare's existing efforts in network expansion and protocol optimization. It details how MPTCP leverages multiple network interfaces (e.g., Wi-Fi and cellular) to create 'subflows' for a single TCP connection, enhancing aggregation and mobility. The post explores MPTCP implementations on Linux and iOS/macOS, discusses configuration for server and client roles, and highlights the challenges and ongoing development in path management and scheduling. It also touches upon the potential for MPTCP to improve reliability for mobile clients and in data center scenarios, aligning with Cloudflare's goals of a faster, more reliable internet.

12/9/2024

This post provides a comprehensive 2024 year-in-review of internet trends observed globally and regionally, directly contributing to the understanding of Cloudflare's network growth and performance. Key contributions include data on global internet traffic growth (17.2%), the rapid expansion of Starlink traffic (3.3x), and IPv6 adoption rates (28.5%). It also details the number of major internet disruptions (225) and improvements in routing security, reinforcing the network's role in stability and performance.

11/20/2024

This post details how Cloudflare's global network infrastructure, particularly in Europe, demonstrated resilience against multiple submarine cable cuts. It analyzes traffic volume indicators, internet quality metrics (bandwidth and latency), and BGP announcements for Lithuania, Sweden, Finland, and Germany. The analysis shows minimal to no observable impact on traffic and quality, attributing this to the significant redundancy and alternative routing paths available through multiple submarine cables and terrestrial fiber networks in the region. The post uses Cloudflare Radar data to illustrate these findings and references existing submarine cable maps and network provider maps to support the claims of infrastructure resilience.

10/30/2024

This post details Cloudflare's observation and analysis of the OVHcloud outage on October 30, 2024. It includes traffic graphs showing the impact on Cloudflare's origin traffic, analysis of BGP routing shifts, and the discovery of evidence pointing to a BGP route leak from Worldstream (AS49981) impacting OVHcloud. It also highlights Cloudflare's own protective measures, such as max prefix-limits, which prevented the route leak from affecting Cloudflare's network.

10/1/2024

This post details how Cloudflare's global network visibility and analytics capabilities were used to observe and report on the impact of a major Verizon mobile network outage. By analyzing HTTP request volume from Verizon's autonomous system (AS6167) and specific impacted cities, Cloudflare provided real-time insights into the decline and subsequent restoration of internet traffic, highlighting the network's ability to monitor and understand large-scale service disruptions.

9/27/2024

This post details how Cloudflare's free tier directly impacts the economics of its global network operations. It explains how the free service drives ISP peering, reducing bandwidth costs, and enables efficient utilization of network capacity by leveraging off-cycle headroom. The post also outlines the cost components of the network (bandwidth, hardware, colocation) and how the free tier helps manage these costs. It further elaborates on how free customers contribute to product development through early testing and provide unique threat intelligence.

9/20/2024

This post introduces "Scenario Planner," a new system for capacity planning that allows internal teams to simulate "what-if" scenarios related to demand and supply changes across Cloudflare's global data centers. It details the system's inputs (demand and supply changes), calculations (conversion to CPU Time and distribution across regions), and outputs (heatmaps and "Expected Failovers" views). The post also elaborates on the importance of CPU Time as a unit of measurement for capacity planning and provides examples of demand and supply "what-if" questions and their corresponding inputs and calculations within Scenario Planner.

9/20/2024

This post details an incident on September 17, 2024, where Cloudflare inadvertently stopped announcing fifteen IPv4 prefixes due to an internal software error during a routine renumbering exercise. This led to a temporary outage for some Business plan websites. The post explains the background of the Addressing team's work on IP address management and renumbering, the specific software bug that caused the failure (related to legacy SSL configurations and incomplete website renumbering), the incident timeline, and the immediate fix (rollback). It also outlines preventative measures including enhanced testing for outstanding assignments, improved verification processes for prefix withdrawals, and a review of legacy system functions.

9/3/2024

This post details the White House roadmap for enhancing internet routing security, focusing on the importance of BGP security and the adoption of RPKI. It explains how BGP vulnerabilities can lead to hijacks and leaks, and how RPKI, through Route Origin Authorization (ROA) records and Route Origin Validation (ROV), provides a cryptographically secure mechanism to validate IP prefix origins. The post also discusses past incidents of BGP hijacks and leaks, emphasizing the need for widespread RPKI adoption to mitigate these risks and improve overall internet routing security.

8/6/2024

This post details Cloudflare's global backbone infrastructure in 2024, highlighting a 500% increase in capacity since 2021. It explains the strategic importance of the backbone for traffic routing control and cost-effectiveness, detailing peering and IP transit methods. The post showcases how the backbone supports internal traffic (e.g., tiered caching, Magic Transit) and external traffic from public clouds. It emphasizes the network's expansion into regions with less developed infrastructure to combat traffic tromboning and improve localized data flow, supporting Data Localization Suite. Performance improvements, such as reduced latency between Lisbon and Johannesburg, are quantified with RTT measurements.

8/1/2024

This post details recent internet disruptions observed by Cloudflare Radar in Bangladesh, Syria, and Pakistan during July 2024. It highlights government-ordered shutdowns in Bangladesh due to protests, scheduled exam-related shutdowns in Syria, and a large-scale disruption in Pakistan affecting major ISPs. The post provides specific data on traffic drops, IP address space changes, and the timeline of service restoration for each region, underscoring Cloudflare's role in monitoring and reporting on global internet stability.

7/30/2024

This post details how Cloudflare's global network infrastructure provided real-time insights into the internet traffic impact of the Paris 2024 Summer Olympics. It analyzes traffic drops and increases in France during the opening ceremony and specific events, notes shifts in mobile traffic share, and observes global traffic variations. The post also highlights country-specific traffic impacts and DNS trends to official Olympic websites, demonstrating the network's capability to monitor and report on large-scale events and their effect on internet usage patterns worldwide.

7/11/2024

This post analyzes the impact of the UEFA Euro 2024 football tournament on internet traffic in Spain and England. It details how major matches, particularly those with crucial moments or against strong opponents, led to significant drops in internet traffic in these countries. The analysis showcases Cloudflare's ability to monitor and report on real-time internet traffic fluctuations driven by major global events, demonstrating the scale and reach of its network infrastructure in observing user behavior.

7/4/2024

This post details a specific incident on June 27, 2024, where a BGP hijack of 1.1.1.1/32 by ELETRONET S.A. (AS267613) and a route leak of 1.1.1.0/24 by Nova Rede de Telecomunicações Ltda (AS262504) caused temporary unreachability and high latency for the 1.1.1.1 DNS resolver. It explains the technical details of BGP hijacks and route leaks, the incident timeline, and the impact on users, emphasizing Cloudflare's commitment to improving detection and advocating for RPKI adoption to prevent future occurrences.

6/28/2024

This post analyzes the impact of the first 2024 US presidential debate on internet traffic and security trends. It details state-level traffic drops during the debate, identifies shifts in traffic for microblogging and video streaming platforms, and notes the increased traction of Trump-related sites. The post also highlights higher rates of spam and malicious content in emails with 'Trump' in the subject compared to 'Biden,' and confirms no increase in cyberattacks during the debate itself, though noting preceding DDoS attacks on political sites.

6/21/2024

This post demonstrates how Cloudflare's global network and its data centers in over 320 cities provide a unique vantage point for observing and analyzing internet traffic trends. It specifically details the impact of the UEFA Euro 2024 football games on internet traffic in European countries, noting drops in traffic during games broadcast on national TV and increases in traffic for paid or streamed content. The post also highlights the observation and mitigation of application layer DDoS attacks targeting websites in Germany during the tournament, showcasing the network's role in both understanding traffic patterns and ensuring security during large-scale events.

6/21/2024

This post details the impact of recent internet shutdowns in Syria, Iraq, and Algeria, implemented to prevent exam cheating. It analyzes how Syria uses BGP to effectively shut down internet access by not announcing IP address space, leading to asymmetrical traffic flow. The post also examines the impact on DNS resolution and application traffic, and contrasts Syria's approach with Algeria's content blocking strategy. This contributes to the understanding of how national entities leverage network infrastructure for control and the resulting implications for global internet connectivity.

5/14/2024

This post details the impact of submarine cable cuts on East African internet connectivity, highlighting how Cloudflare Radar observed and reported on traffic drops in affected countries. It also showcases the importance of network redundancy and the role Cloudflare's global network plays in monitoring and understanding these disruptions.

4/9/2024

This post details the impact of the Great North American Eclipse on internet traffic across Mexico, the US, and Canada. It provides specific data on traffic drops (bytes delivered and HTTP requests) at aggregate and state/provincial levels, correlating these drops with the path of totality. The analysis showcases Cloudflare's ability to monitor and report on real-world events affecting network usage, reinforcing the understanding of how human behavior and natural phenomena influence internet traffic patterns across its global network.

3/14/2024

This post details the impact of multiple undersea cable failures on internet connectivity in several African countries on March 14, 2024. It leverages Cloudflare Radar data to map the geographical spread and temporal progression of disruptions, identifying specific countries and network providers affected. The post highlights the reliance of the internet on submarine cables and references previous similar incidents. It also details the specific cables impacted (WACS, MainOne, SAT-3, ACE) and mentions the impact on Microsoft Azure and the MainOne website. The post concludes with a commitment to continued monitoring and provides links to Cloudflare Radar's Outage Center and social media channels for updates.

3/8/2024

This post provides an update on Cloudflare's network performance benchmarking, detailing improvements in 95th percentile TCP connection times and highlighting the impact of HTTP/3 adoption. It introduces a refined methodology for network selection, ensuring a consistent set of top 1000 networks for measurement. The post quantifies Cloudflare's performance advantage over competitors like Amazon CloudFront, Google, Akamai, and Fastly, showing it as the fastest provider in 44% of measured networks for TCP connection time and 73% for mean TCP connection time. It explains how HTTP/3, built on QUIC, accelerates connection setup by enabling parallel TLS encryption and connection establishment, leading to significant latency reductions.

3/6/2024

This post announces 'Express CNI,' a significant update to Cloudflare Network Interconnect (CNI). It introduces a drastically simplified and accelerated provisioning process (under 3 minutes and 3 clicks) directly from the Cloudflare dashboard. Key improvements include the elimination of GRE tunnels for Magic Transit and Magic WAN, enabling direct 1500-byte packet transfer. The post also highlights the cost benefits of CNI, emphasizing no port fees or inter-region bandwidth charges, and details the user experience of ordering and configuring a CNI. Future plans include extending Express CNI features to interconnection partners and expanding data center support.

2/8/2024

This post investigates the performance implications of reducing the number of source IPv4 addresses used by Cloudflare's cache service for egress connections. It identifies a performance bottleneck in the TCP connect() syscall, specifically within the `__inet_hash_connect()` function, which is exacerbated when using a single IPv4 address due to port exhaustion. The analysis reveals that the Linux kernel's port selection algorithm, which prioritizes even or odd ports in separate passes, leads to significant latency when even ports are exhausted. This research directly contributes to Cloudflare's strategy of deprecating IPv4 and moving towards IPv6 by understanding and mitigating the performance challenges associated with reduced IPv4 address allocation.

12/14/2023

This post contributes to the understanding of Cloudflare's global network expansion by providing a detailed analysis of IPv6 adoption. It leverages DNS query data from 1.1.1.1 to estimate both client-side and server-side IPv6 adoption, comparing these findings with HTTP traffic data from Cloudflare Radar. The post highlights the current state of IPv6 adoption, its historical growth patterns, and the challenges and importance of its continued deployment.

10/9/2023

This post leverages Cloudflare's global network data to provide real-time insights into internet traffic patterns, network outages, and cyberattacks in Israel and Palestine following the October 2023 attacks. It details specific network disruptions in the Gaza Strip, traffic surges in Israel, and significant DDoS attacks targeting both regions, showcasing the network's ability to monitor and report on critical events impacting internet connectivity and security on a global scale.

9/26/2023

This post addresses the emerging challenge of AWS imposing charges for IPv4 addresses, framing it as an interruption to the internet's cost reduction trend. It positions Cloudflare's global network and its robust IPv6 support as a solution, enabling customers to transition to IPv6 with AWS and avoid these new costs. The post provides a step-by-step guide for configuring Cloudflare and AWS for IPv6 compatibility, and offers a financial credit to users who adopt this solution. It also elaborates on the technical and economic reasons behind the scarcity of IPv4 addresses and the advantages of IPv6.

9/26/2023

This post introduces the integration of an internal traffic anomaly detection and alerting tool into Cloudflare Radar, making country and network-level traffic anomalies visible on the Outage Center and available via API. It also launches new notification functionality allowing users to subscribe to alerts for traffic anomalies, confirmed Internet outages, route leaks, or route hijacks. This enhances the network's ability to provide real-time insights into global internet health and disruptions.

9/25/2023

Introduced Traffic Manager, an automated system for dynamically routing traffic across Cloudflare's global network to balance supply and demand. Developed Traffic Predictor, a system that simulates data center failures to predict traffic failover paths and inform Traffic Manager's policies. This enables granular route adjustments to prevent issues like 'thundering herd' scenarios and 'stranding capacity'.

7/28/2023

This post introduces Cloudflare Radar's new BGP origin hijack detection system, bringing internal monitoring capabilities to the public. It details the mechanics of BGP and origin hijacking, explains the limitations of current prevention mechanisms like RPKI, and outlines the design of Cloudflare's detection system, which uses a prefix trie to monitor BGP update messages for origin changes and identify potential hijacks. This enhances the network's security and stability by providing public visibility into routing anomalies.

7/27/2023

This post introduces the Cloudflare Radar Routing page, which provides detailed insights into BGP messages, IP prefixes, autonomous systems, and countries. It enables users to examine routing status, identify anomalies such as route leaks, hijacks, and RPKI invalid MOASes, and understand network connectivity. The post also highlights the availability of API access to this routing data, further enhancing the capabilities for monitoring and analyzing the internet's routing infrastructure.

6/22/2023

This post details Cloudflare's ongoing efforts to improve network performance, specifically highlighting the increase in networks where Cloudflare is the fastest provider (from 33% to 46%) and the improvement in networks where it's within 2ms or 5% of the fastest (from 8% to 10%). It outlines the tooling and processes used, including Real User Measurements (RUM) and a Performance Benchmarks Dashboard, to monitor metrics like TCP Connection Time and Time to First Byte (TTFB). The post also details the three main categories of actions taken to improve performance: establishing peering, expanding compute capacity, and applying traffic engineering.

6/19/2023

This post details the Orpheus system, which identifies Internet connectivity outages beyond Cloudflare's network in real time and leverages Cloudflare's global network to find alternative paths around these outages. It explains how Orpheus reduces 522 errors by ensuring origin reachability even when direct BGP routes fail or are compromised, and how it reuses components of Argo Smart Routing's control plane to provide failover paths. The post highlights Orpheus's impact, saving billions of requests and preventing numerous incidents.

6/19/2023

This post announces the expansion of Cloudflare's global network to over 300 cities and connections to over 12,000 Internet networks. It details the strategic importance of this expansion for reducing latency, improving interconnections with local ISPs and networks, and building network resilience. Specific examples of latency improvements in Brazil and Pakistan are provided, along with statistics on the number of stub ASNs and Cloudflare's direct connectivity to them. The post also highlights the value of local interconnections in driving network usage and encourages network operators to connect through the Edge Partner Program.

6/13/2023

This post contributes to the global network expansion feature by detailing how Cloudflare Radar monitors and reports on government-imposed internet shutdowns in Iraq and Algeria during exam periods. It analyzes traffic data, BGP announcements, and DNS resolver usage (1.1.1.1) to understand the nature and impact of these disruptions, highlighting differences in implementation (routing vs. blocking) and regional variations. This showcases Cloudflare's role in providing visibility into and understanding of internet stability challenges globally.

5/19/2023

Introduced China Express, a suite of connectivity and performance offerings in partnership with China Mobile International (CMI), CBC Tech, and Niaoyun. One of the services, Private Link, provides an optimized, high-quality circuit for overseas connectivity from China to the global internet. A real-world example with 'Acme Corp' demonstrated significant performance improvements, including doubling performance during peak hours, a 54% improvement in average load time, and an 81% increase in availability for origin pull requests compared to using the public internet.

5/12/2023

This post details the impact of government-ordered internet shutdowns and social media blocking in Pakistan on network traffic, as observed through Cloudflare's data. It analyzes traffic trends at national, administrative unit, and city levels, highlighting the shift from mobile to fixed broadband, the increase in 1.1.1.1 resolver usage, and the observed increases in traffic to blocked social media platforms. This contributes to the understanding of how Cloudflare's global network infrastructure is affected by and can report on large-scale internet disruptions.

5/10/2023

This post analyzes the impact of a major global event, the coronation of King Charles III, on internet traffic patterns across Cloudflare's network. It details specific traffic spikes and dips correlated with key moments of the coronation and related events like the Coronation Big Lunch and Concert. The analysis also highlights regional differences in traffic impact (e.g., Wales experiencing the largest Sunday drop) and the significant role of mobile devices during such events. It further draws parallels with previous events like the Queen's Platinum Jubilee and Eurovision, showcasing Cloudflare's capability to observe and report on large-scale traffic shifts and their correlation with real-world events.

5/8/2023

This post argues against proposed network usage fees in Europe, explaining how they would create fast lanes for Big Tech and slow lanes for others, negatively impacting European consumers and small businesses. It details Cloudflare's extensive peering infrastructure and advocates for settlement-free peering as a mechanism to keep the internet open and performant, contrasting it with the proposed regulatory intervention that would artificially inflate interconnection prices.

5/2/2023

This post leverages Cloudflare's global network visibility and analysis tools (Cloudflare Radar) to document the significant internet disruption in Sudan caused by armed conflict. It details traffic drops, ISP outages, BGP update spikes, and shifts in messaging app usage, providing real-time data and insights into the impact of geopolitical events on internet infrastructure and user behavior. It also highlights the disproportionate reliance on mobile traffic in Sudan and its implications during such crises.

4/18/2023

This post analyzes the impact of bandwidth and latency on internet connection speed, using real-world data and analogies. It demonstrates that while bandwidth is important for large file transfers, latency has a more significant and linear impact on web page load times. The post highlights Cloudflare's focus on reducing latency through global network expansion and by moving content closer to users, explaining how latency affects TCP/TLS handshakes and the sequential loading of web page assets. It also introduces the concept of 'working latency' or 'responsiveness' as a more accurate measure of user-perceived speed.

4/12/2023

This post contributes to the Global Network Expansion thread by providing a detailed overview of internet disruptions observed in Q1 2023. It showcases Cloudflare's ability to monitor and report on these events across numerous countries and network providers, highlighting the impact of government-directed shutdowns, cable cuts, and power outages on internet stability. This reinforces the importance of Cloudflare's extensive global network in understanding and mitigating such disruptions.

4/4/2023

This post details how Cloudflare Radar observed and analyzed a significant outage experienced by Virgin Media (AS5089) in the UK. It provides concrete data on traffic drops and correlates them with BGP announcement and withdrawal activity, demonstrating the practical application of network monitoring and analysis in understanding and reporting on internet disruptions. The post also highlights the cascading effect of such outages, including the unavailability of the ISP's own status page due to its DNS nameservers being hosted within the affected network.

3/10/2023

This post details Cloudflare's network expansion into Indonesia, highlighting the geographical, infrastructural, and market challenges. It outlines the specific steps taken to improve network performance and reliability in the region, including establishing local PoPs, interconnections with major ISPs, and peering at local IXPs. Performance benchmarks from December 2021 and December 2022 are presented, showing significant improvements in connect time and TTLB, positioning Cloudflare as a leading provider in the Indonesian market.

2/23/2023

This post details how Cloudflare's global network infrastructure and services played a critical role in maintaining internet resilience and connectivity in Ukraine during the first year of the war. It highlights the network's ability to absorb significant traffic shifts, mitigate application-layer cyberattacks, reroute traffic away from compromised networks, and support the increased use of satellite internet services like Starlink. The analysis demonstrates the network's robustness in the face of physical infrastructure damage and cyber warfare, showcasing its capacity to adapt to extreme geopolitical events and ensure continued internet access.

1/20/2023

This post contributes to the global network expansion feature by detailing Cloudflare's observations of internet disruptions in Q4 2022. It highlights how Cloudflare's extensive global network allows it to monitor and report on government-directed internet shutdowns in Cuba, Sudan, and Iran, as well as power outage-related internet disruptions in Bangladesh, Pakistan, and Kenya. The post showcases Cloudflare Radar's ability to track these events and provides insights into their causes and impacts, demonstrating the network's role in observing and understanding global internet resilience.

1/13/2023

This post announces the expansion of Cloudflare Network Interconnect (CNI) to support direct private connections from major public cloud providers (IBM Cloud, Google Cloud, Azure, OCI, AWS) into Cloudflare's network. This allows customers to manage their cloud connectivity privately, integrating seamlessly with Cloudflare One products like Magic WAN and Access, simplifying network architecture and reducing vendor dependencies. The post details the ease of provisioning these connections directly from cloud provider portals.

1/13/2023

This post announces 'China Express,' a new suite of capabilities and best practices developed in partnership with China Mobile International (CMI) and CBC Tech to address performance and connectivity challenges in mainland China. It introduces Premium DIA for optimized cross-border connectivity, Private Link for secure private network connections, and Travel SIM for mobile Zero Trust security. The post also highlights the extension of Cloudflare One and Zero Trust services to China, enabling consistent security policies for employees and offices.

12/16/2022

This post introduces a new method for measuring the adoption of RPKI Route Origin Validation (ROV) by Internet Service Providers. It details the challenges of measuring ROV deployment and presents Cloudflare's novel approach using browser-based probes to continuously monitor the reachability of RPKI-invalid origins. The post provides global data on ROV deployment, highlighting significant variations by country and emphasizing the need for broader adoption to secure internet routing.

12/15/2022

This post details the implementation and benefits of the Edge Partner Program (EPP) in next-generation markets. It explains how embedding Cloudflare nodes within ISPs reduces latency and improves performance for mobile-first users by shortening the physical distance to Cloudflare's network. The post also emphasizes the role of Argo Smart Routing in optimizing traffic and reducing latency for uncached content, especially in regions with dispersed users. It highlights that 80% of new cities over the past four years have been in next-generation markets due to this program.

12/13/2022

This post announces the expansion of Project Pangea, a program that provides free internet connectivity, DDoS protection, and network firewalling to underserved community networks. The key expansion is the relaxation of technical requirements, specifically removing the need for participants to bring their own /24 IP space, making the program accessible to a wider range of community networks. It highlights the impact of Magic Transit and Magic Firewall in these networks and shares a success story from Ayva Networks.

12/13/2022

This post highlights Cloudflare's participation in the Montgomery, Alabama Internet Exchange (MGMix). It explains the role of IXs in improving internet performance by facilitating direct traffic exchange between networks, reducing reliance on costly transit providers. The post details the challenges and successes of establishing MGMix, including its impact on reducing latency and improving throughput in underserved regions. Cloudflare's decision to join MGMix is presented as a strategic move to enhance local internet performance and support digital equity.

11/29/2022

This post announces the expansion of Cloudflare One's SASE capabilities into mainland China through strategic partnerships. It details how these partnerships enable accelerated traffic from China to resources outside China by optimizing cross-border packet flows and enforcing security policies. It also describes how the WARP client will be adapted to enforce uniform security policies for remote users in China, and outlines future plans to extend full SASE filtering to local China data centers.

11/25/2022

This post details the evolution of Cloudflare's egress network design. It explains the challenges of using anycast for egress traffic and the shift from a unicast IP per server model to a more complex system. The post introduces the need for differentiating traffic types (trusted vs. untrusted, country-tagged) and the resulting explosion in required IP addresses. It then discusses two extreme solutions (each server owns all IPs vs. one server owns IPs) and proposes a third, hybrid way that leverages IP address management and routing strategies to handle diverse traffic types while maintaining the benefits of anycast for ingress traffic. This includes strategies for managing IP address cardinality and cost, particularly for IPv4.

11/24/2022

This post explains the fundamental concepts of BGP, including Autonomous Systems, IP prefixes, and routing announcements. It details how BGP messages carry metadata like AS-path and communities, and introduces the BGP best path selection algorithm. The post specifically contrasts AS-path prepending with BGP communities as traffic engineering tools, explaining the limitations of prepending and the advantages of communities for influencing inbound traffic, showcasing Cloudflare's advanced understanding and application of these protocols for network optimization and resilience.

11/23/2022

This post introduces Cloudflare Radar's route leak data and API, making information about route leaks across the internet publicly available. It details the system built to detect route leaks using data from public sources and Cloudflare's global network, and explains the concepts of BGP and various types of route leaks (Type 1, 2, 3, and 4) as defined by RFC7908. This enhances the 'Global Network Expansion' thread by demonstrating how Cloudflare leverages its network visibility to actively monitor and mitigate internet routing issues, contributing to overall internet stability.

10/19/2022

Introduced a new Cloudflare Peering Portal that supports PeeringDB logins, eliminating the need for separate Cloudflare-specific accounts. This allows network operators to use their existing PeeringDB credentials to log in and manage peering sessions. Additionally, the portal now allows users to directly request peering sessions at Internet Exchanges, which are then processed by Cloudflare's network team. This significantly simplifies the process of establishing direct connections with Cloudflare's network.

10/18/2022

This post details observed internet disruptions during Q3 2022, categorizing them by cause (government-directed shutdowns) and geography. It provides specific examples from Iraq, Cuba, Afghanistan, Sierra Leone, Somaliland, India, and Iran, illustrating the impact of these shutdowns on internet resilience and highlighting Cloudflare's role in observing and reporting these events through its global network and tools like Cloudflare Radar.

9/22/2022

This post details how Cloudflare's network infrastructure and data analysis capabilities, particularly through Cloudflare Radar, were used to monitor and report on widespread internet disruptions and DNS blocking implemented by the Iranian government during protests. It provides concrete data on traffic drops across major Iranian ISPs and social media platforms, illustrating the impact of these government actions on internet accessibility and censorship.

9/22/2022

This post announces the general availability of 'Regional Services' in India, Japan, and Australia, expanding Cloudflare's ability to meet data localization requirements globally. It details how Regional Services work by leveraging Anycast and BGP to ensure traffic is routed to data centers within a customer-defined region for decryption and inspection, while raw traffic can be forwarded encrypted to the correct region if initially routed elsewhere. This directly addresses customer needs for regulatory compliance and contractual agreements regarding data handling.

8/25/2022

This post contributes to the 'Global Network Expansion' thread by highlighting how Cloudflare's deep dives into network operations, including TCP optimization, kernel live-patching with eBPF, and understanding internet outages through BGP analysis, directly inform and improve the robustness and performance of its global network. It also touches upon the evolution of internet trends and the underlying infrastructure required to support them, demonstrating the network's role in observing and responding to global internet phenomena.

8/6/2022

Introduced a mechanism to provide geographically accurate browsing experiences for WARP users by replacing their original IP addresses with Cloudflare egress IPs that are associated with approximate locations in geolocation databases. This involves analyzing network traffic to estimate user distribution per city, allocating egress IPs using anycast, and submitting geolocation data to providers. Additionally, WARP+ subscribers now benefit from an expanded network with over 20 new cities.

7/25/2022

Details the deployment of a new data center in Hagatna, Guam, highlighting its strategic geographical location for reducing latency to residents of Guam and nearby archipelagos. It discusses the submarine cable infrastructure serving Guam and the peering arrangements with local Internet Exchange Point (MARIIX) participants. The post quantifies the performance impact by showing a significant reduction in Round Trip Time (RTT) for AS 9246 users, from a median of 136.3ms to 9.3ms, and an increase in HTTP requests in Guam, indicating higher Internet traffic.

7/8/2022

This post details Cloudflare's analysis of the Rogers Communications outage in Canada, providing real-time data and insights into the event. It explains the role of BGP in internet routing and how a spike in BGP updates and prefix withdrawals led to the widespread disruption. The post showcases Cloudflare Radar's ability to monitor and report on such large-scale network events, emphasizing the interconnected nature of the internet and the impact of failures within major ISPs.

7/5/2022

This post contributes to the Global Network Expansion thread by providing a detailed overview of internet disruptions observed in Q2 2022. It showcases Cloudflare's ability to monitor and analyze network resilience through real-world events like optic outages (fiber cuts) and government-directed shutdowns. The post uses traffic graphs from Cloudflare Radar and internal tools to illustrate the impact of these disruptions on various regions and networks, including shifts in traffic composition (mobile/desktop, IPv4/IPv6). This data directly informs the understanding of network stability and the challenges faced in maintaining global internet performance.

6/27/2022

This post details the latest network performance benchmarks, showing Cloudflare as the fastest provider in 1,290 out of the top 3,000 networks as of June 2022. This represents an increase from 1,280 networks in May 2022. The data is derived from Real User Measurements (RUM) of a 100kB file transfer. Specific improvements were observed in Eastern European countries. The post also reiterates the importance of network performance for Zero Trust architectures and highlights ongoing efforts to expand peering and add new locations to maintain and improve performance.

6/21/2022

This post details a significant outage on June 21, 2022, caused by a misconfiguration during a BGP policy change in Cloudflare's newly architected Multi-Colo PoP (MCP) data centers. The change inadvertently withdrew critical site-local prefixes, leading to a loss of connectivity to 19 major data centers and impacting 50% of global traffic. The post provides a detailed timeline, technical description of the error (re-ordering of BGP policy terms causing an explicit reject), and outlines remediation steps focusing on process improvements, architectural redesigns, and enhanced automation for staggered rollouts and automated rollback.

6/10/2022

This post details the impact of submarine cable cuts on the AAE-1 and SMW-5 cables, affecting millions of users across the Middle East, Africa, and Asia. It uses Cloudflare Radar data to illustrate traffic drops and recovery, and explains how Cloudflare's distributed network and proactive measures like Orpheus help maintain content availability and performance during such disruptions. It also highlights the importance of network redundancy and diverse physical paths for critical infrastructure.

6/6/2022

This post details the evolution of HTTP protocols, specifically highlighting the adoption and usage trends of HTTP/3 across Cloudflare's network. It analyzes traffic data from browsers and bots, showcasing the increasing adoption of HTTP/3 and its impact on network performance, reinforcing the network's role in supporting and driving the adoption of new internet standards.

5/4/2022

This post details how Cloudflare's global network and routing analysis capabilities were applied to track an internet outage and a shift in routing control in Kherson, Ukraine, during a conflict. It demonstrates the network's ability to observe and adapt to geopolitical disruptions, rerouting traffic to different data centers (e.g., Moscow) in response to upstream provider changes, and then reverting as connectivity was restored through local networks. This highlights the network's resilience and the importance of real-time monitoring in dynamic and challenging environments.

4/29/2022

This post announces the addition of four new cities to Cloudflare's global network: Ahmedabad, India; Chandigarh, India; Jeddah, Saudi Arabia; and Yogyakarta, Indonesia, bringing the total to 275 cities. It highlights the expansion in India, detailing the growth to 12 cities and improved interconnection with major networks. The post also quantifies the performance benefits of the new Jeddah location, showing a 26% reduction in median latency (from 81ms to 60ms) and its impact on daily request handling.

4/4/2022

This post reviews selected Internet disruptions observed by Cloudflare during the first quarter of 2022, grouping them by associated cause. It details specific incidents in Tonga, Japan, The Gambia, Yemen, Tasmania, Iran, Cuba, Venezuela, Pakistan, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Taiwan, providing traffic graphs and attributing outages to volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, submarine cable damage, data center fires, and power outages. It also highlights the role of Cloudflare Radar and internal tools in observing these events.

3/24/2022

This post introduces Cloudflare Radar's new Autonomous System (AS) pages, providing detailed traffic statistics, protocol usage, security information (DDoS attacks), geographical traffic distribution, and BGP announcement volumes for individual ASes. It highlights how this data can be used to understand unusual internet events like outages and attacks, and reinforces Cloudflare's commitment to increasing transparency into the internet's infrastructure.

3/21/2022

This post details Cloudflare's continuous efforts to improve network performance and expand its reach, reporting that it is now the fastest provider in 71% of the top 1,000 most reported networks globally. It highlights specific case studies in Canada and Australia where performance issues were diagnosed and resolved through network optimizations, including addressing congestion via improved peering and direct interconnection. The post also presents updated performance metrics showing improvements since the 'Full Stack Week' update, with Cloudflare becoming the fastest provider in 19 new networks and achieving #1 status in all of South America and several other countries.

3/21/2022

This post announces the addition of 18 new cities to Cloudflare's global network, bringing the total to over 270 cities. It highlights the performance improvements achieved through the ISP Edge Partnership Program, using Israel as a case study where latency was reduced from 86ms to 29ms for a specific ISP by deploying servers locally. The post also details the specific new cities added across Africa, South America, Asia, and the Middle East.

2/23/2022

This post details a specific BGP route leak incident caused by a configuration error during a network upgrade. It highlights the operational challenges of hot-cuts, the role of prefix limits as a safeguard, and the importance of BGP security protocols like RPKI and RFC8212. It also emphasizes the impact of confirmation bias on operational decision-making and the need for further network automation and training to prevent similar incidents.

2/22/2022

This post details the restoration of internet connectivity to Tonga after a 38-day outage caused by an undersea cable break. It highlights Cloudflare Radar's role in monitoring the traffic increase post-repair and discusses the technical aspects of undersea cable systems, their reliability, and the specific incident involving the cable connecting Tonga to Fiji. It also touches upon the use of satellite services as a temporary alternative and the ongoing repairs for domestic cables.

1/5/2022

This post details Cloudflare's real-time monitoring and analysis of a nationwide internet shutdown in Kazakhstan, triggered by civil unrest. It uses Cloudflare Radar data to show the impact on internet traffic, mobile services, and BGP routing. The post highlights the correlation between internet service restoration and public announcements by the Kazakh President, suggesting a pattern of controlled unblocking. It also draws parallels to other internet shutdown events globally, underscoring Cloudflare's role in observing and reporting on network disruptions.

1/5/2022

This post analyzes the January 4, 2022, internet outage in The Gambia, detailing its cause as a failure in the ACE submarine cable and a subsequent issue with terrestrial backup links via Senegal's Sonatel. It uses BGP data to illustrate The Gambia's reliance on a single network path for international connectivity and highlights the critical nature of submarine cable systems and terrestrial interconnections for national internet access. The post also references The Gambia's regulatory authority's plans to explore securing a second fiber cable backup.

12/11/2021

This post details Cloudflare's strategy for solving network interconnection challenges for CIOs and IT teams. It outlines three key areas: making interconnection valuable by providing access to security, reliability, and performance products; expanding interconnection availability through Cloudflare for Offices and partner networks; and reducing provisioning times by automating BGP configurations, streamlining cross-connect provisioning, and improving uptime. The post emphasizes the benefits of direct, private, and performant access to Cloudflare services, bypassing the public internet, and highlights the network effects derived from its large customer base.

11/22/2021

This post details a significant internet shutdown in Sudan lasting 25 days, highlighting the impact of political turmoil on internet access. It uses Cloudflare Radar data to show the restoration of traffic, the role of specific ISPs, and the prevalence of mobile traffic in the country. It also contextualizes this event within a history of internet disruptions in Sudan and emphasizes the commonality of such events globally.

11/20/2021

This post details significant advancements in Cloudflare's network performance, reporting that Cloudflare has become the fastest provider in 79 new networks (a 14% increase) during Full Stack Week. It also highlights a 196% speed advantage for Cloudflare Workers over Fastly's Compute@Edge. The post provides specific case studies of network performance improvements in Peru and Sri Lanka, detailing how issues with traffic routing and latency were diagnosed and resolved, leading to Cloudflare achieving number one ranking in those regions. The post reinforces the ongoing commitment to continuous network optimization and benchmarking.

11/12/2021

This post addresses recent vulnerabilities discovered in RPKI validation software, specifically within Cloudflare's OctoRPKI tool. It details the nature of these vulnerabilities (arbitrary file writes and uncontrolled resource consumption) and the mitigations implemented in version 1.4.0. The post reinforces Cloudflare's commitment to securing BGP routing through RPKI and highlights their proactive approach to addressing security research in this critical area.

11/1/2021

This post details a significant internet outage in Sudan, highlighting Cloudflare Radar's ability to monitor and report on country-wide internet access disruptions. It provides historical context for internet shutdowns in Sudan and emphasizes Cloudflare's role in observing global internet traffic and country-specific connectivity.

10/25/2021

This post leverages Cloudflare Radar to track and analyze the widespread internet outage in Sudan following a political coup. It provides data-driven evidence of the disruption to both mobile and desktop traffic across major ISPs, highlighting Cloudflare's ability to monitor and report on global internet connectivity events.

10/9/2021

This post leverages Cloudflare Radar to analyze global mobile internet traffic trends, identifying countries with the highest and lowest mobile traffic proportions. It highlights how mobile devices are the primary internet access method in many emerging economies and provides regional breakdowns of mobile vs. desktop usage, showcasing the diverse ways users access the internet through Cloudflare's network.

10/4/2021

This post provides an external perspective on the Facebook outage, detailing how Facebook's internal BGP and DNS configuration changes led to their services becoming unreachable. It explains the role of BGP in internet routing, shows how Facebook stopped announcing its routes, and the subsequent impact on DNS resolution. The post also highlights Cloudflare's monitoring capabilities, its DNS resolver's resilience during the event, and the cascading effects on other internet services, underscoring the interconnectedness of the internet and the importance of robust network infrastructure.

10/2/2021

This post details Cloudflare's efforts to improve network performance in 61 country/network pairs where latency exceeded 100ms behind the leading provider. It explains how Cloudflare identified these issues through benchmarking and then implemented specific technical solutions, including rectifying route advertisement in Brazil by rerouting traffic from a transit provider to a private network interconnect (PNI) via their backbone, establishing new peering sessions in Spain to keep traffic local, and optimizing upstream selection in Africa by adjusting BGP LOCAL_PREF values to prefer a transit provider over a private peer for specific network prefixes. The post quantifies the improvements, showing Cloudflare becoming the #1 network in 29 of these pairs and significantly improving performance in almost all of them.

9/19/2021

This post details the achievement of connecting to over 10,000 networks through Project Myriagon, a significant expansion of Cloudflare's global network. It explains the importance of Autonomous Systems (ASNs) and BGP in internet routing, highlighting how direct interconnections reduce latency and avoid congestion. The post quantifies the impact with a real-world example of a 90% reduction in median end-user latency. It also introduces Project CatchG, aiming to further increase network connectivity.

9/17/2021

This post introduces a detailed benchmarking experiment using Real User Measurement (RUM) data to compare Cloudflare's network performance against key competitors (Akamai, Amazon CloudFront, Fastly, Google). It outlines the methodology, including the use of the Resource Timing API and measurement of TCP connection time, TTFB, and TTLB across approximately 21,000 ASNs. The results demonstrate Cloudflare's leading performance in most global network segments and metrics, highlighting the company's commitment to continuous optimization and data-driven improvement of its global network.

9/16/2021

This post details how Cloudflare's Magic suite (Magic Transit, Magic WAN, Magic Firewall) leverages the company's global network expansion and architecture to significantly improve network performance. It explains how Anycast, ubiquitous service deployment, and advanced routing techniques (beyond traditional BGP) reduce latency and eliminate the 'trombone effect' inherent in legacy network architectures. The post provides concrete examples and test results demonstrating performance gains, and introduces Argo Smart Routing for Packets as a further optimization.

9/16/2021

This post details the construction and benefits of Cloudflare's dedicated backbone network, comprising long-distance and metro fiber optic cables connecting data centers globally. It explains how this backbone provides guaranteed network capacity and consistent latency, enabling faster and more reliable packet routing. The post includes a real-world test demonstrating performance improvements, showing an average response time reduction of 31% for requests from São Paulo and 44% from Tokyo when using the backbone compared to the public internet. It also highlights the integration of the backbone with dynamic routing technologies like Argo Smart Routing, Argo Tiered Caching, WARP+, and Orpheus to optimize route selection.

9/13/2021

This post announces the expansion of Cloudflare's network to over 250 on-network cities, a 3.5x increase in external network capacity since early 2020, and an 800% increase in long-haul internal backbone capacity. It details the addition of 17 new cities across eight countries and 37 cities in mainland China. The post emphasizes the importance of interconnections, including PNIs and CNIs, and the strategic use of the backbone for traffic management and security. It also highlights the expansion of undersea backbone rings for transatlantic and transpacific connectivity.

7/26/2021

This post introduces Project Pangea, a new initiative by Cloudflare to address global internet inequality by providing transit to ISPs in underserved communities. It also presents detailed analysis of internet performance (bandwidth and latency) across eight countries, highlighting the 'tyranny of averages' and revealing pockets of poor performance even in developed nations. This data directly informs and supports the ongoing efforts of global network expansion by identifying areas that require improvement and demonstrating the real-world impact of uneven internet access.

7/26/2021

Project Pangea offers free Cloudflare Network Interconnect, Magic Transit, and Magic Firewall services to non-profit community networks serving underserved areas. This initiative aims to reduce the cost of Internet access for these communities and provide them with secure, performant, and reliable connectivity by leveraging Cloudflare's global network and security features to mitigate issues like DDoS attacks.

7/23/2021

This post introduces and details the Bandwidth Alliance, a program launched in late 2018 with over fifteen cloud providers. The alliance aims to combat cloud vendor lock-in by reducing or eliminating egress fees for data transfer between Cloudflare and its partners. It explains how Cloudflare's extensive global network and peering capabilities enable these cost reductions through private network interconnects (PNI) and peered connections. The post highlights significant customer benefits in terms of cost savings and increased choice, providing specific examples and customer testimonials, and also mentions the integration with Microsoft Azure for discounted egress.

7/22/2021

This post details the significant upgrade of Cloudflare's China network through a partnership with JD Cloud. It highlights improvements in DNS serving by bringing nameservers within Mainland China, reducing latency and improving reliability. It also describes advancements in DDoS mitigation, pushing L7 attack detection and mitigation to the edge and integrating with local ISPs for L3/L4 attack mitigation. The post provides data demonstrating at least a 30% performance improvement in latency and TTFB for both static and dynamic content, as well as DNS response times, due to the enhanced network design and JD Cloud's infrastructure.

7/21/2021

This post details a significant expansion of Cloudflare's network into over 25 cities in Brazil through a partnership with a major ISP. This expansion has resulted in a more than halving of the 25th-percentile latency for non-bot traffic, from the mid-20ms range to sub-10ms. The expansion is part of Cloudflare's mission to improve internet experience globally and is expected to continue with further city additions.

7/6/2021

This post introduces a new integration with Microsoft Azure's Routing Preference service, enabling Cloudflare customers to benefit from lower data transfer costs when using Azure as an origin. It highlights the technical details of the interconnection, including private peering and internet exchanges, and outlines the simple steps for customers to enable this feature. The post also emphasizes the shared philosophy between Cloudflare and Microsoft in promoting customer choice and avoiding vendor lock-in.

6/30/2021

Added ten new Cloudflare cities in Tbilisi (Georgia), San José (Costa Rica), Tunis (Tunisia), Yangon (Myanmar), Nairobi (Kenya), Jashore (Bangladesh), Canberra (Australia), Palermo (Italy), Salvador (Brazil), and Campinas (Brazil), expanding into four new countries. Doubled computational capacity since the start of pandemic-related lockdowns. Demonstrated performance improvements in Kenya using 25th percentile latency of non-bot traffic. Continues to experiment with ARM, ASICs, and Nvidia technologies for edge deployments.

6/11/2021

This post announces the expansion of Cloudflare Network Interconnect (CNI) to over 1,600 locations through new and expanded partnerships with Layer 2 service fabric providers like PacketFabric, Megaport, Equinix Fabric, Console Connect, CoreSite Open Cloud Exchange, and Infiny by Epsilon. It details how customers can now connect to Cloudflare's network privately and securely from their existing fabrics, even when not in the same data center as Cloudflare. The post highlights the ease of provisioning these connections via partner portals and the benefits of reduced latency, increased redundancy, and improved security.

5/28/2021

This post announces the general availability of QUIC version 1 (RFC 9000) on Cloudflare, marking a significant milestone in the evolution of internet transport protocols. It details the technical aspects of enabling QUIC and HTTP/3, including the use of UDP, default security, faster handshakes, and the role of HTTP Alternative Services (Alt-Svc) for discovery. The post highlights Cloudflare's in-house open-source implementation, 'quiche', and its widespread adoption by other projects, underscoring Cloudflare's role in driving the standardization and deployment of this critical internet technology. It also provides insights into the current traffic share of QUIC/HTTP/3 and the tools used for testing and interoperability.

3/25/2021

This post introduces 'Route Leak Detection,' a new network alerting feature for Cloudflare customers who have 'brought their own IP' (BYOIP) addresses. It explains the dangers of BGP route leaks and hijacks, how the detection feature works by monitoring global routing tables for unauthorized prefix advertisements, and how customers can configure it. The post also emphasizes the importance of RPKI for preventing such leaks and highlights Cloudflare's advocacy and ongoing efforts to improve internet routing security.

3/22/2021

This post announces the expansion of Cloudflare's global network reach through new 'Network On-ramp Partnerships'. It introduces partnerships with VMware, Aruba, and Infovista for WAN/SD-WAN connectivity, and with Digital Realty, CoreSite, EdgeConneX, 365 Data Centers, BBIX, Teraco, and Netrality Data Centers for private interconnection. These partnerships aim to simplify customer connections to Cloudflare's network from their existing infrastructure, enhancing security, performance, and observability for corporate networks and enabling a more seamless transition from traditional MPLS links.

1/15/2021

This post details Cloudflare's real-time monitoring and reporting capabilities during a government-ordered internet shutdown in Uganda. It showcases how Cloudflare Radar and network traffic analysis, including BGP routing data, were used to observe and document the complete cessation and subsequent re-establishment of internet connectivity in the region, highlighting the global reach and observational power of Cloudflare's network.

1/6/2021

This post details the impact of the Nashville bombing on internet traffic, specifically observing the outage and subsequent recovery of AT&T services in the region through Cloudflare's traffic flow data. It demonstrates the network's ability to monitor and report on large-scale, localized disruptions caused by physical infrastructure damage, highlighting the resilience of services operating on battery power and the eventual return to normal traffic flows.

11/6/2020

This post provides a significant update on Cloudflare's efforts to secure internet routing via RPKI. It details the progress in ROA creation, the success of the 'isbgpsafeyet.com' website in driving adoption of BGP Origin Validation, and highlights the release of new versions of Cloudflare's open-source RPKI software (OctoRPKI and GoRTR). It also showcases the growth in usage of Cloudflare's public RPKI services and dashboard, and provides projections for future RPKI adoption.

8/30/2020

This post details how Cloudflare's diverse network of providers and automated systems successfully rerouted traffic around a significant CenturyLink/Level(3) outage, minimizing customer impact. It highlights the challenges posed by single-homed connectivity and BGP route withdrawal issues, and speculates on the root cause being a Flowspec rule impacting BGP announcements, drawing parallels to Cloudflare's own past Flowspec-induced outage. The post underscores the importance of robust network resilience and the complexities of internet routing protocols.

8/4/2020

Introduced the Cloudflare Network Interconnection Partner Program, enabling customers to connect privately and securely via software-defined layer 2 networking technology in 23 metro areas across five continents. This program offers secure, efficient, performant, and cost-effective connectivity options through partners like Console Connect, Megaport, PacketFabric, Equinix ECX Fabric, and Zayo Tranzact, reducing overhead and providing data center independence.

8/4/2020

This post introduces Cloudflare Network Interconnect (CNI), a new capability that allows customers to directly connect their on-premise networks to Cloudflare's global network. CNI offers private network interconnects (PNIs) and Internet Exchange (IX) options, providing enhanced security, reliability, and performance benefits compared to using the public internet. It integrates with existing Cloudflare products like Cloudflare Access, CDN, Magic Transit, and Cloudflare Workers, enabling dedicated on-ramps to Cloudflare's network for improved performance and reduced threat exposure, particularly for Magic Transit by removing GRE tunnels over the public internet. The post also provides a hypothetical example of Penguin Corp using CNI with Cloudflare for Teams and Magic Transit to secure its branch and core networks.

7/30/2020

This post announces the general availability of Bring Your Own IP (BYOIP) for Cloudflare's Layer 7 products, Spectrum, and Magic Transit. It details how customers can use their own IP prefixes with Cloudflare's edge network, enabling them to benefit from Cloudflare's performance and security features on their existing IP space. The post highlights the administrative benefits for customers, the technical requirements for BYOIP, and the configuration options available through the UI and API, including support for regional deployments and RPKI.

7/18/2020

This post details a specific outage event caused by a configuration error in Cloudflare's backbone network. It explains the root cause: an incorrect BGP route leak due to a misconfigured policy-statement that removed a prefix-list condition, leading to all BGP routes being sent to all other backbone routers with a higher local-preference. This caused traffic meant for local compute nodes to be rerouted to Atlanta. The post also outlines the immediate actions taken, including disabling the affected router and restoring service, as well as future preventative measures: implementing a maximum-prefix limit on backbone BGP sessions and changing the BGP local-preference for local server routes.

7/15/2020

This post details the expansion of Cloudflare's global network to 206 cities in over 100 countries, including the establishment of new data centers in six cities across six new countries (Laos, Honduras, Malaysia, Liberia, Brunei, Suriname). It highlights the technical and logistical challenges overcome due to the COVID-19 pandemic, such as supply chain disruptions and grounded flights, and how these were managed through partnerships and adapted operational processes. The post also emphasizes the strategic importance of these new locations for increasing edge compute capabilities and improving performance and reliability for users in those regions.

6/26/2020

Introduced 'Regional Services' allowing Enterprise customers to specify geographic regions for Layer 7 traffic processing (WAF, Workers, Bot Management). DDoS protection and network acceleration remain global. TLS keys are stored and used only within the chosen region. Initially supports US and EU regions.

4/28/2020

This post announces a strategic partnership with JD Cloud & AI, adding 150 data centers in mainland China to Cloudflare's global network. This expansion aims to address the technical and logistical challenges of operating in China, providing international businesses with a seamless way to extend their online presence into China and enabling Chinese companies to reach global audiences. The partnership leverages JD Cloud & AI's infrastructure within China and Cloudflare's international network, offering integrated performance and security services controlled via a single dashboard.

4/23/2020

This post provides an update on internet performance during the COVID-19 emergency, confirming Cloudflare's network capacity to handle increased traffic. It presents data on global internet usage growth by country and analyzes TCP Round Trip Time (RTT) to assess network congestion. The data shows that while some regions experienced increased RTT, indicating strain, overall internet performance remained stable, highlighting the resilience of the internet infrastructure.

4/17/2020

This post addresses the critical issue of BGP leaks and hijacks, highlighting the ongoing need to make BGP safer. It details Cloudflare's deployment of RPKI for origin validation, the release of isBGPSafeYet.com to track RPKI adoption by major networks, and the use of test prefixes to demonstrate RPKI effectiveness. The post emphasizes the importance of community-wide RPKI adoption to mitigate routing security threats.

4/11/2020

This post details how Cloudflare leverages its global network of edge routers and flow record sampling to analyze aggregate traffic information and infer geospatial distribution of internet traffic volume. It uses geolocation databases like Maxmind to determine the rough location of traffic origins and visualizes this data using heatmaps to demonstrate the migration of internet usage from office-focused areas to residential areas during the COVID-19 pandemic.

3/17/2020

This post analyzes the impact of global events, specifically the COVID-19 pandemic, on internet traffic patterns. It details observed surges in traffic towards video conferencing, streaming, and news services, alongside a decrease in traffic from business and university networks. The post presents data visualizations showing traffic shifts in various countries (US, Netherlands, France, Italy, Hong Kong) and at major Internet Exchange Points (AMS-IX, LINX, DE-CIX, MXP-IX, HKIX). It quantifies the observed traffic increases, ranging from 10% to 40% depending on the region and government actions, and emphasizes the inherent robustness of the internet infrastructure in handling such dynamic load changes.

3/3/2020

This post introduces and explains the Resource Public Key Infrastructure (RPKI) to Router Protocol (RTR), detailing how it works to secure the BGP routing system. It highlights Cloudflare's operational use of RPKI for signing routes and filtering inbound traffic, as well as its open-source contributions like the Cloudflare RPKI Toolkit and GoRTR. The post emphasizes the importance of RTR for communicating validated route information from RPKI validators to routers, discusses the protocol's specifications and security considerations, and introduces a new open-source tool, `rpki-rtr-client`, for testing the RTR protocol.

2/25/2020

This post details Cloudflare's adoption of AMD EPYC 7642 CPUs for its 10th-generation edge servers, marking a significant hardware upgrade. It highlights the move to higher core density and improved power efficiency (Requests per Watt) by switching from dual-socket Intel Xeon Platinum 6162s to a single-socket AMD EPYC. The post presents extensive benchmarking results across cryptography, compression, and Go/LuaJIT workloads, demonstrating the performance benefits of the new AMD hardware for Cloudflare's compute-intensive software stack, directly contributing to the network's performance and efficiency.

2/24/2020

This post introduces Cloudflare's tenth generation of servers, 'Gen X', highlighting a significant shift away from Intel to AMD EPYC processors for improved performance and cost efficiency. It details the server's compute, memory, storage, and networking components, emphasizing the focus on CPU efficiency for Cloudflare's compute-heavy workloads. The post also discusses the architectural decision to use standard commodity hardware and the flexibility it provides for network expansion and service deployment, reinforcing the core principles of the global network expansion strategy.

1/14/2020

This post details the development of a cost-effective and extensible testbed for transport protocol development, specifically for QUIC and HTTP/3. It outlines the goals of such a lab, including aiding protocol development, debugging, performance comparison, and bottleneck identification. The post describes the lab configuration with Raspberry Pis, Intel x86 boxes, and traffic shapers, as well as test automation and visualization techniques. It also highlights the importance of testing on mobile devices and the integration of smartphones into the testbed to understand real-world performance issues across different operating systems and network conditions. This directly contributes to Cloudflare's ability to innovate and improve network protocols that underpin its global network.

1/4/2020

This post details the addition of seven new data centers in 2019, expanding Cloudflare's presence to 200 cities across 90+ countries. Specific locations include Chattogram and Dhaka (Bangladesh), Honolulu (Hawaii, USA), Adelaide (Australia), Thimphu (Bhutan), and St George's (Grenada). It highlights the strategic importance of these locations for improving user experience, particularly in remote areas and regions with limited existing infrastructure. The post also mentions behind-the-scenes expansions and a focus on edge-computing power.

8/15/2019

This post details Cloudflare's global network expansion to 193 cities across 90+ countries, adding 35+ new locations in 2019 alone. It highlights the evolution from early data center-centric expansion to partnerships with local ISPs to improve performance and reliability. The post also discusses capacity upgrades in existing cities, increased network interconnections, and the sophisticated simulation-based approach used for targeted server deployment and supply chain management.

8/13/2019

This post introduces Cloudflare Magic Transit, a new service that extends Cloudflare's global edge network and its DDoS mitigation capabilities to on-premise networks. It leverages BGP and Anycast to announce customer IP address space globally, ingest traffic, and provide secure, performant IP connectivity. This significantly expands the application of Cloudflare's network infrastructure beyond traditional web applications to encompass entire enterprise networks.

6/27/2019

This post provides a deep-dive analysis of a major BGP route leak event that occurred on June 24, 2019, caused by Verizon and a BGP optimizer. It details the technical investigation using RIPE NCC archived data to identify affected routes, the timing of the leak (approximately two hours), and the implications of invalid route propagation. The post highlights the importance of BGP communities like NO_EXPORT and the role of RPKI ROAs in preventing such incidents, directly contributing to the understanding and mitigation of global network stability issues.

6/24/2019

This post details a significant BGP route leak incident that caused widespread internet outages, impacting Cloudflare's services. It explains the technical cause involving a BGP optimizer and Verizon's insufficient filtering, highlighting the vulnerabilities in current BGP practices. The post strongly advocates for the adoption of routing security measures like RPKI, prefix limits, and IRR filtering, emphasizing Cloudflare's own implementation and urging other network operators, particularly Verizon, to adopt them to prevent future incidents.

6/2/2019

This post significantly expands the 'Global Network Expansion' thread by detailing how Cloudflare's global network infrastructure is leveraged for advanced multi-cloud capabilities. It introduces load balancing across different cloud providers and on-premise hardware, the Argo Tunnel technology for simplified and secure multi-cloud networking, and the application of access control policies within this distributed network. It also reiterates the reliability benefits derived from the global, anycast network architecture in a multi-cloud context.

5/13/2019

Introduced the Cloudflare Global Private Backbone, a network of private fiber connections linking Cloudflare data centers. This backbone provides enhanced control over end-to-end performance and capacity management, resulting in significantly reduced jitter (e.g., 536μs vs. 4ms between Chicago and Newark) and improved reliability compared to transit providers. The backbone is automatically integrated with Argo Smart Routing, allowing it to select optimal paths across both the public internet and the private backbone, further improving TTFB latency by an additional 16%.

2/24/2019

This post details Cloudflare's implementation of Resource Public Key Infrastructure (RPKI) to enhance the security of BGP routing. It introduces two open-source tools, GoRTR and OctoRPKI, developed to simplify RPKI deployment for network operators. The post explains the benefits of RPKI for users and website visitors, such as reduced risk of cache poisoning and route hijacks, and outlines the technical details and usage of these tools.

2/5/2019

This post details Cloudflare's efforts to enhance its integration with Microsoft Azure. It announces the availability of an Azure application for Cloudflare Argo Tunnel in the Azure Marketplace, enabling secure, encrypted connections between origins and the Cloudflare edge. It also highlights Cloudflare's support for Azure's serverless static web hosting by providing guides for SSL issuance and renewal, and promotes the use of Cloudflare's 1.1.1.1 DNS resolver with Azure, including daily performance monitoring on the platform.

12/20/2018

This post announces the addition of ten new data centers in Charlotte (USA), Columbus (USA), Manama (Bahrain), St. Petersburg (Russia), Hà Nội (Vietnam), Hồ Chí Minh City (Vietnam), Karachi (Pakistan), Lahore (Pakistan), Islamabad (Pakistan), and Sainte-Marie (Réunion). These additions bring the total number of cities with Cloudflare data centers to 165, with significant improvements in latency and DDoS mitigation capabilities expected for users in these regions.

11/15/2018

This post details a specific incident of a route leak caused by a Nigerian ISP's network misconfiguration, which led to a significant outage for Google and other services. It explains the technical details of route leaks, Autonomous System (AS) numbers, and AS Paths, illustrating how trust without verification across multiple networks (MainOne, China Telecom CN2, TransTelecom) amplified the impact. The post also highlights Cloudflare's auto-remediation capabilities in detecting and mitigating such incidents and advocates for improved network filtering and best practices like RPKI and BCP-38 to enhance internet stability.

10/30/2018

This post announces the deployment of a new Cloudflare data center in Lagos, Nigeria. This expansion aims to improve local performance and DDoS mitigation for Nigerian users by serving content locally rather than from Europe. The deployment leverages colocation with undersea cable operators and connectivity to local Internet Exchange Points (IXPN and WAF-IX).

10/23/2018

This post details the integration of Cloudflare's network services (DDoS mitigation, WAF, smart routing, load balancing) into IBM Cloud's new Cloud Internet Services (CIS) Enterprise offering. It highlights how Cloudflare's global network of over 150 PoPs, with a capacity of 20+ Tbps, is used to protect and accelerate IBM Cloud customers' applications. The integration allows IBM Cloud customers to manage these services through the IBM Cloud UI, simplifying operations. It also mentions the Bandwidth Alliance waiver for data transfer fees between IBM and Cloudflare servers for CIS Enterprise plan customers.

10/22/2018

Introduced the Cloudflare Peering Portal (Beta) to provide ISPs and hosting providers with detailed statistics on traffic exchange with Cloudflare. This includes time series traffic statistics, peering session statistics, prefix data, and POP relative traffic weighting. The portal aims to help partners estimate potential transit cost savings, performance improvements, and bandwidth management benefits of peering or hosting Cloudflare nodes.

10/10/2018

This post details the evolution of Cloudflare's server hardware with the introduction of the G9 generation. It highlights significant upgrades in CPU cores (from 12 to 192 per server), network interface speeds (from 10G to 25G), and storage (datacenter-grade SSDs). The focus on maximizing compute density, improving performance per watt, and enhancing I/O latency directly contributes to the network's ability to handle increasing traffic volumes and maintain high performance across its global infrastructure.

10/3/2018

This post details the technical and logistical process of establishing a new Cloudflare data center in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia. It covers the negotiation of data center space and bandwidth partners, the adherence to PCI/DSS compliance, the complex logistics of hardware shipping and customs, and the deployment process involving remote hands contractors and automated network configuration. It highlights the reduction in latency for users in Mongolia and the achievement of having data centers for every letter of the alphabet.

9/26/2018

Introduced the Bandwidth Alliance, a collaboration between Cloudflare and other cloud providers to reduce data transfer fees for mutual customers. This alliance is technically underpinned by Cloudflare's Argo traffic routing engine, which is adapted to optimize for cost by leveraging direct peering and low-cost connections with alliance partners. A limited, routing-only version of Argo is provided to alliance partners to ensure traffic is routed to the nearest Cloudflare location, facilitating the use of Private Network Interfaces (PNI) and reducing bandwidth costs.

9/26/2018

Introduced the Bandwidth Alliance, a partnership with cloud and networking companies to reduce or eliminate data transfer fees for mutual customers. This initiative leverages existing peered connections and introduces smart routing to ensure traffic between Cloudflare and participating providers qualifies for reduced or zero bandwidth rates. Founding members include Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, IBM Cloud, Automattic, Backblaze, DigitalOcean, DreamHost, Linode, Packet, Scaleway, and Vapor. The estimated annual savings for Cloudflare customers is $50 million.

9/19/2018

This post details Cloudflare's proactive deployment of RPKI for securing BGP routing decisions, signing its own routes, and offering an RTR server to encourage wider adoption of route origin validation. It explains the technical underpinnings of BGP and RPKI, Cloudflare's implementation strategy, and the development of GoRTR to securely distribute RPKI caches. The post also highlights the importance of certificate transparency and ongoing efforts to combat route leaks and promote RPKI adoption.

9/19/2018

This post introduces Resource Public Key Infrastructure (RPKI) as a cryptographic method to secure BGP routing, addressing the pervasive issues of route leaks and hijacks. Cloudflare announces its commitment to deploying RPKI and outlines the basic concepts of BGP, ASNs, and CIDRs, contrasting RPKI with the less secure Internet Routing Registry (IRR) system. It emphasizes RPKI's role in securing route origins and Cloudflare's leadership in promoting its adoption for global BGP security.

9/12/2018

Announced the addition of two new data centers in Norfolk and Richmond, Virginia, bringing the total to 153 cities. These locations are strategically chosen to cover more of Virginia and neighboring regions, enhancing network performance and security.

9/10/2018

This post details the decision to increase the IPv6 MTU on Cloudflare's edge servers from a hardcoded 1280 bytes to 1400 bytes. This change was driven by the need to support UDP traffic forwarding for Cloudflare Spectrum, which requires a larger MTU to accommodate encapsulated VPN packets. The post explains the original problem with Path MTU discovery and ICMP packet drops in the ECMP routing setup, the temporary fix of reducing the MTU, and the analysis of eyeball MTU distributions to select a new, more appropriate MTU value that minimizes reliance on Path MTU Detection.

8/19/2018

This post details the growth of Cloudflare's presence in Africa, including the establishment of 8 data centers by July 2018 and the observed traffic growth and latency improvements resulting from this expansion. It analyzes the impact of lower latency on TCP throughput and user behavior, discusses inter-African routing challenges, and highlights the role of anycast networks and provider preferences in determining traffic flow.

7/19/2018

This post details the rapid growth of IPv6 users and traffic originating from Mainland China, specifically highlighting China Mobile's aggressive IPv6 enablement and announcement of IPv6 address blocks to the internet. It discusses the necessity of IPv6 due to IPv4 exhaustion and the challenges of Carrier Grade NAT (CGN) and NAT64. The post notes that on June 7th, China Mobile started announcing IPv6 address blocks, and Cloudflare observed a significant increase in IPv6 traffic from China Mobile users.

4/25/2018

This post details a significant BGP leak incident that affected Amazon's Route53 DNS servers and, consequently, Cloudflare's 1.1.1.1 DNS resolver in specific regions. It explains the mechanics of BGP leaks, how this particular incident was exploited to facilitate cryptocurrency theft via a phishing website, and the various actors and vulnerabilities involved. The post also highlights Cloudflare's role in detecting the leak and discusses potential solutions and existing protections like DNSSEC, HSTS, and DANE to mitigate such attacks.

4/10/2018

This post details the challenges and efforts involved in ensuring global reachability to Cloudflare's new DNS resolver, 1.1.1.1. It highlights how widespread misconfigurations and intentional misuse of the 1.1.1.1 IP address by ISPs and CPE manufacturers were identified using RIPE Atlas probes. The post outlines the process of contacting these operators to resolve issues, leading to significant improvements in 1.1.1.1 availability worldwide. It also touches upon the unsolicited background traffic observed on these IPs, indicating potential botnet activity or misconfigurations.

3/31/2018

This post details the addition of two new data centers in Luxembourg City and Chișinău, expanding Cloudflare's global network to 151 cities. It highlights the rapid provisioning process, averaging one city per day in March, and the criteria for selecting new data center locations (significant traffic delivery, performance improvement potential, and facility standards). It also touches upon the logistics of hardware deployment, remote provisioning by the engineering team, and the impact of reduced latency on traffic.

3/30/2018

Cloudflare launched its 149th data center in Bogotá, Colombia, located at 2625 meters above sea level. This marks the 29th city added in March and the 11th deployment in the Latin America and Caribbean Region, situated in a Tier III facility within the Bogotá Free Trade Zone.

3/30/2018

Added three new data centers in Jacksonville (Florida), Memphis (Tennessee), and Tallahassee (Florida), bringing the total to 148 cities globally and 42 in North America. These additions reduce latency for millions of internet properties and expand capacity to withstand attacks.

3/29/2018

This post announces the launch of three new data centers in Calgary, Saskatoon, and Winnipeg, expanding Cloudflare's presence in Canada to six cities. It also highlights Cloudflare's participation in local Internet Exchanges (YYCIX, YXEIX, MBIX) and encourages more ISPs to interconnect within the Canadian Prairies.

3/29/2018

This post announces the launch of three new data centers in Riga, Tallinn, and Vilnius, expanding Cloudflare's global network to 142 cities and 39 cities in Europe. It details the interconnection with multiple local Internet exchanges in the Baltic region.

3/23/2018

This post announces the addition of a new data center in Edinburgh, Scotland, bringing the total to 139 cities globally and 3 in the UK. It highlights the strategic importance of this expansion for regionalizing traffic and fostering peering community growth by connecting to IXScotland.

3/23/2018

This post announces the addition of a new data center in Cebu City, Philippines, expanding Cloudflare's global network to 138 locations. This expansion aims to improve performance and security for users in central and southern Philippines by reducing latency.

3/20/2018

This post announces the launch of new data centers in Durban, South Africa, and Port Louis, Mauritius, expanding the Cloudflare network to 137 cities. It details the specific interconnection points in Durban (NAP Africa IX Durban and DINX) and highlights the latency improvements for Mauritius. It also mentions ongoing expansion efforts in Africa, with a focus on partnering with ISPs in Central and West Africa.

3/14/2018

This post announces the addition of Cloudflare's 134th data center in Mexico City, Mexico. This new data center improves performance and reduces latency for users in the Mexico City metropolitan area and Mexico as a whole. It marks Cloudflare's entry into Mexico, with traffic previously served from US data centers. The company also mentions future interconnections with IXP Mexico and potential expansion to Guadalajara, Monterrey, and Queretaro.

3/14/2018

This post announces the deployment of five new data centers in the United States: Houston, Indianapolis, Montgomery, Pittsburgh, and Sacramento. It details the network expansion strategy, including peering with local ISPs and Internet Exchange Points (IXPs) in these new locations. The post also mentions the ongoing goal of expanding edge compute capabilities and future plans for deploying at cell towers.

3/9/2018

Announces the launch of Cloudflare's 127th data center in Macau, marking their 44th data center in Asia. This expansion aims to improve performance and security for internet-facing applications in the region.

3/8/2018

This post announces the deployment of Cloudflare's 126th data center in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, in partnership with Zain. This expansion aims to improve performance and resilience for Internet properties in the region by reducing latency. Additional Middle East deployments are planned.

3/7/2018

This post details the addition of a new Point of Presence (PoP) in Reykjavík, Iceland, bringing the total to 125 locations globally. This new PoP leverages Iceland's abundant green electricity and natural cooling for power-intensive operations, and its strategic location to reduce latency for users within Iceland by connecting directly to the RIX Internet Exchange. It also highlights the submarine cables connecting Iceland to the rest of the world and the latency improvements achieved by this new deployment.

3/6/2018

Announced the launch of Cloudflare's 124th data center in Istanbul, Turkey, marking its 34th data center in Europe. This expansion is part of a broader initiative to increase geographic coverage and capacity, with an average of nearly one new data center per day being announced in March 2018.

2/23/2018

Announced the deployment of Cloudflare's 123rd data center in Kathmandu, Nepal, marking the 42nd data center in Asia. Highlighted the strategic importance of this location for reducing latency in Nepal and its role in the broader SAARC region. Also mentioned upcoming deployments in other continents.

2/21/2018

This post announces the launch of Cloudflare's 122nd data center in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. It highlights the strategic importance of this expansion for reducing latency for users in Cambodia, noting a 10x decrease in latency from a local ISP (SINET). The post also provides context on Cambodia's internet penetration and user growth, and reiterates Cloudflare's goal of having data centers within reach of 95% of the world's population by the end of 2018. Future data center locations in mountainous regions and south of the Equator are teased.

2/13/2018

This post details the deployment of a new Cloudflare data center in Beirut, Lebanon. It explains the technical rationale for this deployment, focusing on reducing round-trip latency by approximately 50 milliseconds for users in Lebanon by connecting directly to Ogero, the sole ISP, and the Beirut Internet Exchange (IX). It also discusses the current internet infrastructure challenges in Lebanon, such as low end-user speeds and reliance on a single ISP, and the potential impact of future fiber optic deployments.

1/12/2018

Announces the addition of Salt Lake City as Cloudflare's 120th data center and outlines aggressive network expansion plans for 2018, forecasting facilities in 200 cities and 100 countries by year-end, with 95% of the world's population covered. Highlights the historical significance of Salt Lake City to Cloudflare and the internet.

12/11/2017

This post announces the opening of Cloudflare's 119th data center in McAllen, Texas. It highlights the strategic importance of this location for reducing latency to Mexico by approximately 12 milliseconds and providing a local interconnect point for Mexican ISPs and telcos. The post also mentions the establishment of a new Internet Exchange (IX) in McAllen, MEX-IX, and Cloudflare's intention to enable peering on it. Future expansion plans into Central America and Mexico City are also noted.

11/21/2017

This post introduces the concept of multi-cloud strategies as a growing concern for companies, driven by the desire to avoid vendor lock-in. It highlights the benefits of multi-cloud, including cost efficiencies, negotiation strength, business continuity, and experimentation. Cloudflare's role is positioned as an independent enabler of multi-cloud strategies through its Load Balancing and Global Anycast Network. The post also provides a concrete example with Billforward, demonstrating how Cloudflare's Load Balancing facilitates failover between Google Compute Engine and Amazon Web Services, showcasing the ability to manage traffic across disparate cloud providers with minimal operational changes and no downtime.

10/3/2017

This post announces the launch of a new Cloudflare data center in Zagreb, Croatia, expanding the global network to 118 cities across 58 countries. It highlights the strategic importance of this expansion for reducing latency in Eastern Europe by bringing services closer to users, addressing the current reliance on distant interconnection points like Frankfurt and Amsterdam. The post also notes the growth of the European network and mentions potential future data center locations.

9/9/2017

This post details Cloudflare's preparedness and resilience measures for Hurricane Irma, highlighting the use of Tier IV data centers with robust power and cooling redundancy, on-site emergency supplies, and multiple connectivity options. It also explains how Anycast routing would reroute traffic to other US data centers in the event of a Miami datacenter outage, demonstrating the network's ability to withstand significant regional disruptions.

9/1/2017

This post announces the launch of Cloudflare's 117th data center globally, located in Portland, Oregon. This deployment adds redundancy to existing West Coast data centers and increases capacity for services and attack mitigation. It highlights local ISP interconnections and the ongoing global network expansion.

8/18/2017

This post delves into the technical challenges of IP fragmentation and the importance of Path MTU Discovery for reliable internet communication. It highlights how Cloudflare's network infrastructure must contend with issues arising from intermediate network devices (routers, NATs, middle boxes) that can interfere with fragmentation and ICMP 'Packet too big' messages, impacting protocols like TCP. The post details various scenarios where these issues manifest and the complexities introduced by modern network architectures like ECMP and Anycast, underscoring the need for robust network engineering to ensure consistent performance and connectivity.

8/16/2017

This post highlights the resilience of Cloudflare's network during a major power outage in Taiwan. It demonstrates that even when local infrastructure fails, Cloudflare's data centers, with backup power, can continue to operate. The post also provides insights into user behavior during such events, noting an initial spike in requests as people sought information and a shift from desktop to mobile devices, leading to a decrease in bandwidth usage. This showcases the robustness of the global network in the face of localized disruptions.

7/19/2017

Announced the launch of Cloudflare's 116th data center in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, expanding its presence in South America to eight data centers. This deployment aims to improve performance and security for over six million internet applications in Brazil and provide redundancy for the existing São Paulo data center. The post also highlights the historical significance of Rio de Janeiro in Brazil's internet history and the growth of community-driven ISPs within favelas.

5/25/2017

This post announces the decision to make IPv6 always-on for free domains, removing the toggle and retroactively enabling it for millions of domains. It also details a collaboration with OpenDNS to prototype a new DNS metatype (TYPE65535) that returns both IPv4 and IPv6 addresses in a single query, aiming to further accelerate IPv6 adoption and performance by reducing DNS lookup round trips and improving Happy Eyeballs client behavior.

5/12/2017

Announces the addition of two new data centers in Detroit and San Diego, expanding the global network to 115 data centers and serving traffic from 26 North American cities. Highlights the strategic importance of these locations due to their proximity to international borders and mentions the role of internet exchange points like DET-IX in improving regional interconnection.

5/11/2017

This post announces the opening of Cloudflare's 113th data center in Cape Town, South Africa. It highlights the strategic importance of this deployment for regional performance and redundancy, noting its proximity to users and its role in expanding Cloudflare's presence at the NAPAfrica Cape Town Internet exchange. The post also provides context on Cloudflare's existing presence in South Africa (Johannesburg) and across Africa, and includes a graph showing latency improvements in both Cape Town and Johannesburg.

5/9/2017

This post announces the addition of a new data center in Colombo, Sri Lanka, which is the 112th globally and 38th in Asia. It highlights the performance improvements for six million internet properties in Sri Lanka, with latency decreasing by 4x. The post also mentions upcoming deployments in North America and Africa.

4/12/2017

This post announces the addition of a new data center in Munich, Germany, bringing Cloudflare's global network to 110 data centers and its German presence to five. The new location aims to improve performance for six million websites in Bavaria and enhance DDoS attack resilience.

4/10/2017

This post announces the addition of two new data centers in Curaçao and Djibouti, highlighting their strategic importance due to their locations at undersea cable landing points. It details the specific undersea cables connecting to Djibouti and the role of these new locations in improving regional connectivity, particularly for landlocked countries in Africa and the Caribbean.

4/5/2017

This post announces the addition of Cloudflare's 107th data center in Belgrade, Serbia, expanding its European network to 30 cities. It highlights the company's membership in the Serbian Open Exchange and its goal to improve website performance for millions of users in the region. The post also mentions the growth of the technology industry in Belgrade.

4/5/2017

This post announces the launch of Cloudflare's 106th data center in Kansas City, Missouri, expanding its global network infrastructure to improve performance and reduce latency for websites in the Midwest region of the United States.

3/22/2017

Announced the launch of Cloudflare's 105th data center in Rome, Italy, which benefits over 6 million internet properties with reduced latency and increased security. This expansion increases redundancy for the European network and brings the total number of European cities with data centers to 29. The post also mentions upcoming data center launches in other continents and highlights partnerships with Italian hosting providers.

3/21/2017

Announced the deployment of a new data center in Quito, Ecuador, bringing the total to 104 cities globally. This expansion is part of a broader Latin America network growth, with six cities now in the region. The deployment is in partnership with NAP.EC and aims to localize traffic previously served from Miami.

3/20/2017

This post announces the deployment of a new Cloudflare data center in Yerevan, Armenia, marking its 103rd global data center and 37th in Asia. This expansion aims to improve performance and security for users in Yerevan and surrounding countries by reducing latency.

12/30/2016

This post announces the addition of a new data center in Panama City, Panama, bringing Cloudflare's global network to 102 data centers across 50 countries. It highlights the improvement in latency for end-users in Panama and reiterates the company's commitment to continued network expansion in 2017.

11/30/2016

This post demonstrates the practical application of Cloudflare's global network resilience in the face of a significant infrastructure failure. It showcases how the network automatically rerouted traffic via BGP from a severed undersea cable connection to Jersey, utilizing an alternative path from Paris instead of the usual London route. This event highlights the robustness of Cloudflare's infrastructure in maintaining service continuity during unexpected disruptions.

11/21/2016

This post highlights the significant achievement of 98.01% of sites on Cloudflare using IPv6, demonstrating the platform's role in driving the adoption of this critical internet protocol. It details the performance benefits of IPv6, identifies key countries and networks leading adoption, and analyzes the impact of different devices, operating systems, and browsers on IPv6 usage. The post also showcases Cloudflare's proactive efforts in enabling IPv6 for its customers and its commitment to future internet technologies.

11/14/2016

Announced the deployment of Cloudflare's 101st global data center in Barcelona, Spain. This deployment increases the network's presence in Europe to 28 data centers and marks the third in the Iberian Peninsula. The post also highlights Cloudflare's connection to the Catalunya Neutral Internet Exchange (CATNIX), increasing its participation in internet exchanges to over 150.

11/8/2016

This post details Cloudflare's efforts to build a more resilient network by actively monitoring the internet's health using its global network infrastructure. It introduces the concept of 'internet brownouts' and explains how Cloudflare leverages BGP, custom monitoring tools, and open-source software (ZeroMQ, Prometheus, OpenTSDB) to detect and automatically mitigate network issues. The post highlights the development of an automated mitigation system, inspired by DDoS mitigation techniques, using tools like Napalm and Salt to manage network devices and reroute traffic during failures, ultimately improving performance and reducing customer errors.

9/26/2016

This post announces the expansion of Cloudflare's global network to 100 cities with the addition of 14 new data centers across Africa, North America, Europe, Oceania, and Asia. Specific new locations include Luanda, Boston, Las Vegas, Nashville, Omaha, Philadelphia, St Louis, Tampa, Athens, Lisbon, Helsinki, Brisbane, Manila, and Shanghai. The post highlights the latency improvements in Luanda and the strategic importance of these new locations for serving users closer to the internet. It also mentions doubling network capacity to 10 Tbps and increasing interconnection through peering and exchanges.

8/17/2016

This post provides an updated analysis of global bandwidth costs, comparing transit and peering economics across Europe, North America, Africa, the Middle East, Asia, South America, and Oceania. It details Cloudflare's network expansion to 86 cities and its interconnection strategies, including participation in internet exchanges and peering agreements. The post highlights regional cost variations, challenges in specific markets (e.g., South Korea, Peru, Argentina), and the impact of market dynamics on effective bandwidth costs.

6/21/2016

This post details two incidents of significant packet loss on a major transit provider (Telia Carrier) in June 2016. It highlights the impact on Cloudflare customers (522 errors) and outlines Cloudflare's response, including taking down ports with the problematic provider and shifting traffic. Crucially, it discusses the need for improved communication during incidents and the ongoing work to build a more resilient network through greater interconnection, automated mitigation systems (augmenting BGP to detect packet loss), and increased failover capacity. The post announces plans to extend automated detection and mitigation capabilities to all POPs.

6/16/2016

This post announces the addition of Cloudflare's 83rd data center in Moscow, Russia. It details the impact on latency reduction (over 20ms) for Russian users by localizing traffic delivery, which previously relied on Stockholm and Frankfurt data centers. The post also highlights Cloudflare's participation in key Russian Internet Exchange Points (MSK-IX, Data IX, Global IX), increasing its global IXP participation to over 120.

6/15/2016

This post announces the launch of Cloudflare's 82nd data center in Denver, Colorado. It highlights the technical benefits of this expansion, including a 2x increase in performance for users in the region due to reduced latency. The post also details Cloudflare's participation in two major internet exchanges in Denver (Any2 Denver and IX-Denver) and provides a graph showing latency reduction. It lists existing US data centers and mentions plans for further North American expansion.

6/13/2016

Announced the launch of Cloudflare's 81st data center globally and 23rd in Europe, located in Brussels, Belgium. This expansion aims to improve performance for millions of websites using Cloudflare in Brussels and surrounding regions, and to exchange traffic at the Belgium National Internet Exchange (BNIX). The strategic importance of Brussels due to its hosting of European institutions and high internet penetration was highlighted.

6/10/2016

Added a new data center in Perth, Australia, expanding the global network to 80 cities and increasing the presence in the Oceania region to four data centers. This expansion aims to provide faster and safer internet access for users in Western Australia by serving traffic locally and peering at the Western Australia Internet Exchange (WA-IX).

6/7/2016

This post details Cloudflare's proactive support for the transition to IPv6-only networking, specifically addressing Apple's requirement for iOS apps. It explains the technical reasons for the transition, the challenges involved in global IPv6 adoption, and how Cloudflare's existing IPv6 support, including an IPv6-to-IPv4 gateway and Pseudo IPv4 features, simplifies this migration for customers. It also highlights the performance and security benefits of IPv6 adoption.

5/2/2016

Cloudflare has deployed a new data center in Bangkok, Thailand, expanding its global network to 79 cities. This deployment is part of Cloudflare's Southeast Asia expansion, following Singapore and Kuala Lumpur. The Bangkok data center aims to improve performance for mobile users in Thailand by leveraging ChaCha20-Poly1305 cipher suites for efficient encryption and HTTP/2 Server Push. Cloudflare has partnered with JasTel Network Company for this deployment, enabling local access for JasTel customers and improving the country's internet interconnection through the new Bangkok Neutral Internet Exchange (BKINX).

4/26/2016

This post announces the launch of Cloudflare's 78th data center in Kyiv, Ukraine. It details the strategic importance of this location for localizing content and improving performance for users in Eastern Europe and surrounding regions. The post also touches upon peering strategies with local ISPs to further reduce latency and enhance network resilience.

4/11/2016

Announced the launch of Cloudflare's 77th data center globally and 28th in Asia, located in Taipei, Taiwan. This new data center improves performance by 4x and significantly increases availability for millions of websites previously served from Hong Kong, reducing latency and mitigating issues caused by undersea cable cuts due to the island's active fault lines.

1/22/2016

This post announces the launch of two new data centers in Oslo, Norway (#75) and Minneapolis, USA (#76). It details the strategic importance of these locations, including Norway's high internet penetration rate and historical significance in the ARPANET, and the improved DNSSEC support for .NO domains. The Minneapolis data center is noted for its service to the Midwest USA and its connection to Norwegian ancestry in the region. Both deployments leverage local internet exchanges (NIX, FIXO, MICE) for enhanced connectivity.

1/18/2016

This post details Cloudflare's expansion to its 100th Internet Exchange Point (IXP), highlighting the technical importance of peering for network performance, redundancy, and DDoS mitigation. It explains the concept of peering, the technical breakdown of IXPs as Layer 2 LANs, and the role of BGP in exchanging routes. The post emphasizes how direct peering at IXPs reduces latency by avoiding intermediary networks and improves resilience by providing diverse traffic paths. It also explains how peering helps in counteracting DDoS attacks by providing a direct path for malicious traffic to Cloudflare's filtering infrastructure.

12/30/2015

Announced the launch of Cloudflare's 74th data center in Cairo, Egypt, marking their third data center in Africa. This deployment aims to improve performance for Egyptian websites by reducing latency through local deployments and partnerships with ISPs like Telecom Egypt. The post also mentions ongoing global network expansion with new data centers in the works.

12/24/2015

This post announces the launch of Cloudflare's 73rd data center in Sofia, Bulgaria. It highlights the benefit of localizing European traffic, reducing latency for Bulgarian users previously served from Frankfurt. The expansion increases the global network's surface area for attack mitigation and improves web experience.

12/18/2015

Announces the deployment of a new data center in Hamburg, Germany, bringing the total to 72 globally and 4 in Germany. This expansion aims to improve performance and redundancy for users in Germany and Europe.

12/17/2015

This post announces the addition of two new Points of Presence (PoPs) in Montreal and Vancouver, Canada, bringing the total to 71 globally. This expansion aims to reduce latency for Canadian internet users, highlighting the importance of latency for e-commerce and business metrics. The post also references existing content on HTTP/2.

12/17/2015

This post details Cloudflare's contribution to the netmap project, specifically the merging of a partial kernel bypass feature into the netmap main branch. This enhancement allows for more configurable network interface modes, enabling specific queues to be detached from the host network stack while others remain attached. This improves performance by allowing direct access to network packets for applications, a significant step in optimizing network I/O for high-throughput scenarios.

11/19/2015

Announced the launch of three new points of presence (PoPs) in Mumbai, Chennai, and New Delhi, India. These new sites represent the 66th, 67th, and 68th data centers in Cloudflare's global network. The new PoPs enable Cloudflare to serve all customer content in under 50 milliseconds to users across the Indian subcontinent, a significant improvement over previous latency figures.

11/17/2015

Announced the launch of Cloudflare's 65th data center in Copenhagen, Denmark. This new PoP extends the CloudFlare network to 34 countries, with 17 in Europe. Danish traffic, previously served from Stockholm and Amsterdam, now shifts into Copenhagen. The new site is already mitigating cyber attacks, demonstrating the effectiveness of distributed DDoS mitigation across an expanding network footprint.

11/6/2015

This post announces the addition of a new data center in Phoenix, AZ, marking Cloudflare's 64th global data center and 11th in North America. It highlights the strategic importance of regionalizing traffic to improve performance for users outside major internet exchange points. The post details measurements of local interconnection between Tier 1 Internet providers using BGP community tags to illustrate the concept of 'hot potato routing' and the benefits of local peering. It contrasts the high interconnection in the Bay Area with the low interconnection in Phoenix, demonstrating the need for Cloudflare to bring its network closer to users in less connected regions.

10/6/2015

This post announces the addition of Cloudflare's 63rd data center in Manchester, UK, expanding its global network to 33 countries. It highlights the benefits for customers, including faster content delivery, improved security against attacks, and increased redundancy. The post also notes Manchester's historical significance in computing and announces Cloudflare's membership in IX Manchester, a local peering exchange, to further improve regional connectivity.

9/23/2015

This post provides insights into the adoption rates of iOS 9 by analyzing user agent strings passing through Cloudflare's network. It highlights the impact of the iOS 9 launch on IPv6 adoption, demonstrating Cloudflare's ability to leverage its global network visibility to track significant internet events and the adoption of new technologies.

9/14/2015

This post details the technical, economic, and regulatory challenges of extending Cloudflare's services into mainland China. It describes the partnership with Baidu to overcome these challenges, including the establishment of 17 data centers and the development of a process for ICP license applications. It also highlights the performance benefits achieved, such as a 200ms reduction in request serving time and nearly doubled website availability for sites served on the China network.

9/11/2015

This post announces the deployment of Cloudflare's 45th global point of presence (PoP) in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. It highlights the technical challenge of 'boomerang' traffic in certain Asian ISPs, where requests traverse outside national borders due to a lack of domestic interconnection. The deployment in Kuala Lumpur, facilitated by joining the MyIX neutral Internet Exchange Point, directly addresses this issue by enabling local interconnection of ISPs, leading to improved load times and application performance for users in Malaysia.

9/10/2015

This post announces the launch of Cloudflare's 44th global data center in Berlin, Germany. It highlights Berlin's significance as the capital and second-largest city in the EU by population. The post also mentions the ongoing 'hyperexpansion' initiative, with 14 new PoPs added year-to-date and more planned, and promises future technical blog posts detailing the rapid deployment and management of their global infrastructure.

9/2/2015

This post details the launch of a test server to allow users to test compatibility with IPv6, HTTP/2, and SHA-2 certificates. It showcases Cloudflare's proactive approach to adopting and enabling new internet protocols and security standards, specifically highlighting the dual-stack IPv4/IPv6 support and the use of HTTP/2 for faster web delivery. The post also emphasizes the importance of SHA-2 over the deprecated SHA-1 for enhanced security.

8/27/2015

Announced the deployment of Cloudflare's 43rd Point of Presence (PoP) in Mombasa, Kenya, marking its second data center in Africa. This expansion aims to reduce latency for users in East Africa by serving traffic locally, improving performance from 150-350ms to under 20ms for countries like Uganda and Tanzania. The post highlights the growth of internet infrastructure in Africa and Cloudflare's role in fostering the local internet ecosystem.

8/10/2015

This post announces the deployment of four new data centers in the Middle East (Doha, Dubai, Kuwait City, Muscat), bringing the total to 42 PoPs. It details the latency improvements achieved in the region, reducing it from 200-350ms to as low as 1-10ms in specific locations like the UAE and Qatar. It also highlights partnerships with regional carriers to facilitate this expansion and improve internet infrastructure in MENA.

8/5/2015

Announced the deployment of a new Point of Presence (PoP) in Dublin, Ireland, marking Cloudflare's 38th global data center and 14th in Europe. This PoP will route traffic from Ireland through Dublin instead of London, improving latency and performance for Irish users. The Dublin facility is a modern tier-4 data center.

7/31/2015

This post announces the addition of Cloudflare's 37th data center in Bucharest, Romania. It details the strategic importance of this location for serving users in Eastern Europe and the Balkans, and highlights the extensive interconnection efforts with local ISPs and peering exchanges (Interlan, NetIX, RoNIX, BalcanIX) as well as Tier 1 providers (TeliaSonera, Cogent, GTT/Tinet, NTT, and Telecom Italia).

7/14/2015

This post announces the addition of Marseille, France as Cloudflare's 36th global data center and 2nd in France. It highlights Marseille's strategic importance as an Internet gateway for Mediterranean countries, reducing latency for users in Algeria by half and improving access speed for websites and applications behind Cloudflare. The deployment also adds redundancy to the Paris data center and signifies France as the second European country with multiple Cloudflare data centers.

7/3/2015

This post details the challenge of propagating configuration changes across Cloudflare's global network in near real-time, specifically for DNS records and WAF rules. It introduces a custom alert system using Raspberry Pis and a visible police light to monitor propagation times from an external perspective, ensuring timely awareness of potential issues.

6/22/2015

This post announces the deployment of Cloudflare's 35th data center in Osaka, Japan. It details the strategic importance of this location for serving the Keihanshin metropolitan area and improving latency for users in Nagoya. The post also discusses the challenges of internet traffic routing in Asia due to a lack of local peering and the role of Internet Exchange Points (IXPs) in improving connectivity. Cloudflare's membership in multiple IXPs in Japan is highlighted as a key factor in optimizing traffic flow.

6/11/2015

This post highlights how Cloudflare's existing support for IPv6 and HTTPS, particularly its automatic IPv6 gateway and Universal SSL, directly addresses new requirements imposed by Apple for iOS 9 and OS X El Capitan. It emphasizes that developers can leverage Cloudflare to meet these mandates without complex backend changes, ensuring their applications work globally and securely. The post also reinforces Cloudflare's role in making modern network protocols accessible and affordable.

6/5/2015

This post highlights Cloudflare's four-year commitment to automatic IPv6 support, demonstrating its significant role in enabling IPv6 connectivity for over two million websites. It showcases the growth of IPv6 adoption through data on unique IP addresses, end-user traffic to mobile devices, and country-specific IPv6 delivery percentages, with a special mention of the Peru datacenter's high IPv6 traffic. The post reinforces Cloudflare's position as a leading global CDN for IPv4/IPv6 content delivery by default and at scale, and emphasizes the increasing importance of IPv6 due to IPv4 address depletion.

4/20/2015

This post details the deployment of new data centers in Auckland and Melbourne, expanding Cloudflare's global network. It explains the rationale behind these deployments, focusing on addressing the single point of failure in Sydney and improving latency for users in New Zealand and Australia. The post also discusses the challenges of fiber connectivity in Auckland and the strategic importance of peering exchanges.

4/1/2015

This post announces the deployment of Cloudflare's 32nd data center in Buenos Aires, Argentina. This expansion aims to reduce latency for Latin American users by bringing content closer to them, addressing the issue of content being hosted outside the region and expensive inter-ISP connectivity. The Buenos Aires data center establishes connectivity with CABASE, an association of IXPs in Argentina, enabling local traffic exchange and content caching within the country.

3/5/2015

This post announces the addition of a new data center in Düsseldorf, Germany, bringing Cloudflare's total to 31 Points of Presence (PoPs). It highlights the strategic importance of Düsseldorf as an international business and telecommunications hub, improving performance and redundancy for Germany and Northern Europe. The post also mentions that this is the first in a wave of new data centers planned for the year.

12/31/2014

This post details the expansion of Cloudflare's global network in 2014, with the addition of data centers in Chile, Spain, Italy, Brazil, Colombia, Peru, and South Africa. It also highlights the rollout of new protocols and security features.

12/9/2014

This post announces the launch of Cloudflare's 30th data center in Johannesburg, South Africa. It details the performance improvements achieved for users in South Africa, Zambia, and Kenya, with latency reductions of up to 100x in South Africa. The post highlights the strategic importance of this expansion for serving the Southern African region and addresses the challenges of high bandwidth costs in Africa.

12/3/2014

Announced the launch of Cloudflare's 29th data center in Lima, Peru, marking its fourth in Latin America. This expansion is driven by a nearly 10x growth in traffic from Latin America over the past year. The new data center aims to reduce latency, improve web performance for users in the region, and add redundancy. It also enhances the network's capacity to absorb cyber attacks, with specific benefits highlighted for the Presidency of Peru and ONPE during elections. The post also teases further global network expansion.

10/2/2014

This post details a specific incident of a BGP route leak from an ISP (Internexa) that caused significant downtime for Cloudflare customers. It highlights the fragility of internet routing protocols and the impact of such leaks on global network availability. Cloudflare's response involved direct collaboration with the ISP, quarantining a data center, and disabling connectivity with the problematic provider, demonstrating their operational response to network disruptions. The post also emphasizes the ongoing challenge of route leakage and Cloudflare's commitment to service availability and post-mortem analysis.

9/28/2014

This post introduces Keyless SSL as a critical technology enabling Cloudflare's continued global network expansion. It explains how Keyless SSL removes the constraint of storing private SSL keys on edge servers, allowing Cloudflare to deploy infrastructure in a wider range of locations, including those with less stringent physical security or where geopolitical concerns about data storage exist. This directly supports the goal of a larger, more performant, and more resilient network.

8/26/2014

This post provides a detailed analysis of the relative costs of bandwidth around the world, explaining the concepts of transit and peering. It breaks down these costs by region (North America, Europe, Asia), using illustrative benchmarks and data on Cloudflare's peering vs. transit traffic split. The post explains how peering agreements, especially those facilitated by non-profit exchanges in Europe, significantly reduce effective bandwidth costs compared to regions with more expensive transit and for-profit exchanges.

7/22/2014

Announced the deployment of Cloudflare's 28th data center in Medellin, Colombia, in partnership with Internexa. This expansion aims to localize content access for Colombian internet users, with an estimated 80% of content accessed in Latin America coming from overseas. The new data center is expected to significantly reduce latency for the 22 million internet users in Colombia.

7/11/2014

This post details Cloudflare's establishment of connections to three new Internet exchanges in Australia (Megaport in Sydney, Brisbane, and Melbourne), doubling its presence in Australia and marking its first participation outside of Sydney. It explains the benefits of peering for reducing latency and improving performance by exchanging traffic directly with ISPs, rather than through third-party transit providers. The post also mentions ongoing global network expansion and participation in other upcoming exchanges.

7/7/2014

This post announces the launch of Cloudflare's 27th data center in São Paulo, Brazil. It details the logistical challenges involved in setting up the data center, including working with hardware vendors, obtaining certification from Anatel, coordinating shipments, and navigating customs with the Receita Federal do Brasil. The primary technical benefit highlighted is the improvement in performance and security for over 2 million sites serving Brazil's 100 million internet users, by reducing latency for traffic originating and terminating within Brazil.

6/17/2014

This post announces the launch of Cloudflare's 26th data center in Milan, Italy. It highlights the benefits of this expansion for reducing latency for Italian users and mentions the Italian Presidency as a new customer. It also teases future data center launches in countries with significant internet user bases.

6/13/2014

This post announces the launch of Cloudflare's 25th data center in Madrid, Spain. This expansion aims to reduce latency for Spanish users by keeping traffic local, rerouting it from Paris and London. It is presented in the context of the World Cup and football passion in Spain.

6/5/2014

This post highlights Cloudflare's significant role in the adoption of IPv6, noting that 20% of the IPv6 web is accessible via Cloudflare customers. It details the challenges faced by some websites in enabling IPv6 due to legacy systems and introduces a 'pseudo IPv4' solution as a temporary workaround to facilitate wider adoption. The post emphasizes Cloudflare's commitment to encouraging full IPv6 enablement for its users.

3/13/2014

This post marks the author's first day as a Network Strategy employee at Cloudflare and highlights the company's significant growth, evidenced by 5,000 new customer sign-ups on the same day. A major contribution is the announcement and detailed explanation of Cloudflare's strategic shift to make IPv6 the default setting for new customers and to gradually enable it for existing customers. This initiative aims to accelerate the adoption of IPv6, addressing the scarcity of IPv4 addresses and ensuring the continued growth of the internet.

1/30/2014

This post details the significant effort and challenges involved in a global data center capacity upgrade. It highlights the dedication of the Cloudflare team in overcoming logistical hurdles like misplaced shipments, customs delays, and equipment fitting issues to ensure timely upgrades in San Jose, Los Angeles, Chicago, Dallas, Ashburn, Hong Kong, London, Stockholm, Miami, Tokyo, Atlanta, Paris, Seattle, Seoul, and Valparaíso. The post emphasizes the team's resilience and problem-solving skills in maintaining network operations and expanding capacity.

1/8/2014

This post announces the launch of Cloudflare's 24th data center in Valparaiso, Chile, marking its first presence in Latin America. This expansion aims to reduce latency for users in Chile and Argentina by routing traffic through this new local data center, rather than through Miami. The post highlights the logistical complexities involved in launching a new data center, including coordination with partners, vendors, and carriers across multiple geographies and languages. It also mentions plans for further expansion in Latin America.

12/31/2013

This post details Cloudflare's infrastructure upgrades in 2013, including a move to 10Gbps per-server infrastructure, a complete rebuild of the DNS infrastructure in Go, standardization of the HTTP request pipeline around Lua, and the creation of a new rules-based WAF. It also outlines plans for significant global network expansion in 2014, including new data centers in Latin America, the Middle East, Africa, and Asia, with a focus on China and Brazil.

7/22/2013

This post details the evolution of Cloudflare's server hardware, specifically the G4 generation, highlighting upgrades in storage (SSDs, increased RAM for caching), CPU (low-power Sandybridge for efficiency and future features), and network interfaces (10Gbps Solarflare cards with kernel bypass technology). This hardware evolution is presented as a direct enabler of their global network expansion and ability to handle increasing traffic and new service demands.

6/6/2013

This post highlights Cloudflare's proactive support for IPv6, detailing its growth on the network, its role as a major IPv6 provider through a free gateway, and the increasing adoption by mobile networks. It also identifies a new trend of IPv6-based attacks, primarily DDoS, and discusses the challenges and opportunities IPv6 presents for threat management.

5/31/2013

This post details a network issue caused by an upstream transit provider's network consolidation and migration, which inadvertently rerouted traffic to Cloudflare's Los Angeles data center, causing overload and service degradation for a portion of users. It highlights Cloudflare's reliance on Anycast routing, the challenges of managing traffic flow through multiple transit providers, and the company's rapid response and collaboration with the transit provider to resolve the issue. The post also emphasizes Cloudflare's commitment to learning from such incidents and improving its internal routing management to prevent future disruptions.

5/8/2013

This post details Cloudflare's analysis of the Syrian internet outage and subsequent restoration. It showcases Cloudflare's capability to monitor BGP route withdrawals and re-announcements across national networks, providing evidence against the government's claim of a cable cut and instead pointing to a systematic shutdown. The post also highlights the observation of a small portion of Syrian IP space that maintained connectivity, further discrediting the official explanation and demonstrating Cloudflare's insight into network behavior during critical events.

5/7/2013

This post details Cloudflare's real-time monitoring and analysis of BGP route withdrawals, specifically in response to Syria's internet shutdown. It highlights Cloudflare's capability to detect and report on such events, showcasing its role in observing and understanding global internet connectivity disruptions.

4/8/2013

This post details Cloudflare's implementation of 'Project Bondage,' which involves port bonding (specifically 802.3ad Dynamic Link Aggregation) and custom IRQ handling. These technical optimizations significantly increase network throughput per server and improve resilience against SYN flood attacks by isolating traffic and preventing bottlenecks, thereby enhancing the overall performance and stability of the global network.

3/6/2013

This post details Cloudflare's innovative use of Anycast routing at both the Wide Area Network (WAN) and Local Area Network (LAN) levels to achieve load balancing and fault tolerance without relying on traditional hardware load balancers. It explains how Anycast directs traffic to the nearest available data center and how, within a data center, BGP routes are managed by software like Bird to distribute traffic across servers and automatically reroute around failures. The post also touches on early experiments with BGP for more sophisticated load balancing, particularly for protocols like UDP.

3/3/2013

This post details a significant outage caused by a bug in a Flowspec rule applied to Juniper edge routers, leading to a system-wide failure and temporary internet disconnection. It highlights the importance of BGP and Flowspec in network management, the challenges of automated rule propagation, and the incident response process to restore services. The post also draws parallels to the Syrian internet outage, emphasizing the critical nature of routing protocols.

1/11/2013

This post details a system-wide migration of over half a million websites to a new provisioning system. The migration involved rebalancing sites to new IP address pools, seamlessly issuing and redeploying SSL certificates (including custom ones), and addressing two specific issues: a staging SSL environment conflict causing temporary SSL errors for a handful of customers, and a brief period of unreachability for a small number of sites due to an incorrectly recorded null route on an IP address that had been under DDoS attack. The new system provides significantly more flexibility and robustness, enabling features like dynamic site tagging for content restrictions and attack mitigation, and improved isolation of attacked sites.

12/1/2012

This post details the reestablishment of internet connectivity in Syria following an outage. It uses BGP maps and internal monitoring data to show the phased restoration of connections with global carriers (PCCW, TATA, Turk Telecom) and the return of traffic levels to pre-outage levels. The analysis highlights Cloudflare's role in observing and reporting on the restoration of internet access.

11/29/2012

This post details the technical observation and analysis of the Syrian internet outage on November 29, 2012. It explains how BGP routes to Syrian IP space (AS29386) were simultaneously withdrawn from all upstream providers (PCCW, Turk Telekom, Telecom Italia, TATA), effectively disconnecting the country. The analysis suggests this was a deliberate configuration update rather than a physical cable cut, based on the systematic withdrawal of routes and the fact that all four physical connections would have needed to be cut simultaneously. A video created with BGPlay visualizes the route withdrawal process.

11/6/2012

This post details Cloudflare's role in diagnosing and helping to resolve a significant Google outage caused by a BGP route leak originating from an Indonesian ISP (Moratel). It highlights the importance of Cloudflare's network engineering team's around-the-clock monitoring of internet routing (BGP) and their ability to quickly identify and communicate with other network operators to fix such issues. The post also serves as a case study illustrating the inherent trust-based vulnerabilities in BGP and how Cloudflare's global network and expertise are crucial for maintaining internet stability and ensuring optimal routes for its customers, even when external factors cause widespread disruptions.

10/31/2012

This post details Cloudflare's infrastructure resilience during Hurricane Sandy, including the redundancy of its data centers (EWR, IAD), backup power systems (batteries, generators), and the network's ability to reroute traffic around failures like the AC-2 undersea cable incident. It also discusses the 'Always Online' functionality serving static versions of sites when origin servers were down and observations on traffic patterns during the storm.

8/22/2012

This post announces the launch of Cloudflare's 23rd data center in Seoul, Korea, marking the last of nine new cities in a recent expansion phase. It highlights the strategic importance of this location for improving performance in the Asia-Pacific region, addressing trans-oceanic cable bottlenecks, and mitigating large DDoS attacks originating from South Korea's high-speed infrastructure. The post also mentions ongoing planning for future expansion into South America, India, Africa, and China.

8/21/2012

Launched a new data center in Warsaw, Poland, the 22nd globally and 8th in Europe. This expansion aims to improve performance in Northeastern Europe and Russia and offload traffic from the Frankfurt data center. The post also outlines plans to expand the London facility and lists potential future European data center locations (Moscow, Milan, Madrid, Sofia, Istanbul).

8/21/2012

This post announces the addition of Cloudflare's 21st data center in Stockholm, Sweden. It details the historical expansion of data centers and highlights the strategic importance of Stockholm as a hub for the Nordic countries, aiming to decrease ping times in the region. The author also mentions the personal excitement of pressing the key to commit the final updates to the router and send traffic to the new data center.

8/14/2012

This post announces the launch of Cloudflare's 20th data center in Prague, Czech Republic. It details how this expansion improves performance for users in the region, reduces load on existing European data centers (Frankfurt and Amsterdam), and contributes to the overall network capacity. It also touches upon the technical challenges of managing Anycast routing, ensuring traffic stays within designated regions, and preventing 'flapping' between facilities, highlighting the work of the network operations team.

8/8/2012

This post announces the launch of Cloudflare's 19th global data center in Vienna, Austria. It highlights the strategic importance of this new facility for improving performance and reducing load on the Frankfurt data center in the fast-growing Eastern European region. The post also mentions increasing the number of transit providers in the region to enhance both performance and network resiliency.

8/3/2012

Announced the launch of a new data center in Toronto, Canada, bringing the total to 18. This facility will improve performance for Canadian users by taking load away from Chicago and Newark. The post also mentions upcoming launches in Europe and Asia.

8/1/2012

This post highlights Cloudflare's development of one of the largest, fastest, and most resilient authoritative DNS networks in the world. It details how the use of Anycast technology, where every server in every data center can answer any DNS query, contributes to speed and fault tolerance. The post also introduces the 'KickassDNS' control panel, emphasizing its ease of use and rapid propagation of updates, and mentions the introduction of custom DNS servers for Business and Enterprise plans, as well as partnerships with hosting providers.

7/27/2012

Announced the launch of Cloudflare's 17th data center in Seattle, Washington, to serve traffic from the Pacific Northwest and reduce load on the San Jose data center. Also noted crossing 400 billion page views and 40 petabytes of bandwidth saved.

7/26/2012

Announced the launch of Cloudflare's 15th data center in Sydney, Australia. This expansion was driven by the need to improve network performance for users in Australia and New Zealand, reducing ping times from over 160ms to under 40ms. The post details the challenges of establishing a presence in Australia due to high bandwidth costs and the negotiation process with local providers.

6/21/2012

This post introduces the concepts of bandwidth and latency as key factors affecting web browsing speed. It explains how TCP's reliability mechanisms, particularly acknowledgements, are limited by latency and the speed of light, impacting download speeds. The post then positions Cloudflare's distributed network of data centers as a solution to this problem by reducing the physical distance between users and their website's content, effectively lowering latency.

5/25/2012

This post marks a significant push for IPv6 adoption among Cloudflare users and the broader internet. It introduces the 'Global IPv6 Challenge' to encourage websites to enable IPv6 support, offering a free and easy-to-use Automatic IPv6 Gateway. The post details two modes of IPv6 support (SAFE and FULL) and announces the upcoming IPv6 Network Testing app to gather data on ISP support and identify network issues. This initiative directly contributes to Cloudflare's mission of building a better web by addressing the IPv4 address space limitations and promoting the transition to IPv6.

5/2/2012

This post details a significant network outage caused by a Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) routing error during scheduled maintenance in Hong Kong. It explains the technical cause of the outage, the impact on traffic, and the immediate steps taken to resolve it. Crucially, it outlines future prevention measures, including implementing verification layers for routing changes and enhancing communication with upstream providers to prevent similar incidents. This post highlights the operational challenges and ongoing efforts to ensure the reliability and resilience of Cloudflare's global network.

4/19/2012

This post details how routing improvements in the network team saved approximately 25ms of latency for requests originating from Southeast Asia (Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia). This reduction in latency resulted in a measured 30% increase in traffic (bandwidth, hits, and page views) from these regions, demonstrating the amplified impact of performance benefits on user engagement and internet use, as explained by TCP's nature.

4/10/2012

This post announces the full support for International Domain Names (IDNs) and UTF8 characters within Cloudflare's interface. Previously, users had to convert IDNs to Punycode, an 'ugly hack'. This update allows direct use of native characters for domains and across the UI, making Cloudflare more accessible to a global audience and reflecting its international expansion efforts.

4/5/2012

This post announces a partnership with DreamHost, making Cloudflare's services available to all DreamHost customers through a one-click integration. It also introduces 'Cloudflare Plus,' a custom plan offered by DreamHost with bundled popular Cloudflare features, demonstrating a new model for distributing Cloudflare's capabilities through hosting partners.

3/28/2012

Cloudflare connected to the Hong Kong Internet Exchange (HKIX), the largest Internet Exchange in Asia, to improve performance for Hong Kong web surfers by keeping traffic local and reducing latency.

2/3/2012

Announced the launch of Cloudflare's 14th data center in Miami, which is among its largest. This facility will serve Central and South America, significantly decreasing latency and expanding capacity for the region. The data center is already serving over 1.1 Gbps of traffic and is expected to grow, taking load off existing data centers in Ashburn, Dallas, and Los Angeles. Further network expansion in 2012 is planned.

1/12/2012

This post highlights Cloudflare's role in expanding the IPv6 web. It notes that while IPv6 adoption by the top 1 million websites is still low, a significant portion of those that do support IPv6 do so through Cloudflare's Automatic IPv6 Gateway. This demonstrates Cloudflare's proactive contribution to the adoption of newer internet protocols as part of its broader mission to improve the internet.

12/9/2011

This post announces Cloudflare's milestone of serving over 100 billion page views in the past year, with a significant portion (25 billion) in the last 30 days. It highlights the network's current average load of over 60,000 requests per second and peak load being even higher. The post also details the network's capacity of over 150 gigabits per second, plans to launch a 14th data center by year-end, and a 40% increase in server capacity in existing data centers.

11/10/2011

Announced the launch of the London (LHR) data center, which is now online and routing traffic. This data center is already handling over 1Gbps of traffic and is the fourth European data center, expanding Cloudflare's global reach to 13 data centers worldwide. The post also mentions plans for another new data center in approximately three weeks.

11/8/2011

This post introduces KTFS, a new key-value based file system designed for rapid, scalable deployment of changes across Cloudflare's network. It highlights KTFS's role in speeding up SSL certificate provisioning and, significantly, in reducing DNS update propagation time from five minutes to under a minute. This demonstrates an internal infrastructure development directly supporting the speed and efficiency of services delivered over the global network.

10/21/2011

This post introduces and explains the Anycast routing scheme, contrasting it with Unicast. It details how Anycast enables multiple machines to share a single IP address, with routers directing traffic to the closest machine. The benefits of Anycast for Cloudflare are highlighted: speed (reduced latency by serving requests from the edge), resiliency (traffic automatically reroutes around data center outages), and attack mitigation (distributed nature absorbs DDoS attacks). The post also touches on the complexity of implementing Anycast, requiring ownership of hardware, direct carrier relationships, and route tuning.

8/26/2011

This post details the specific preparations made at the Ashburn, VA data center for Hurricane Irene, including generator testing, staff availability, emergency supplies, and physical weatherproofing. More importantly, it reinforces Cloudflare's core architectural design for resilience, emphasizing that the system is built to withstand entire data center outages without service interruption due to traffic automatically rerouting to other global locations. It also reassures users that their sites will remain online even if their hosting provider is affected by the storm, and that Cloudflare will monitor their sites.

6/17/2011

Announced the launch of Cloudflare's 12th data center in Singapore, marking its expansion into South Asia. Traffic is already flowing through the new facility, and network providers are being optimized for performance benefits across the region. This addition brings the total to 12 data centers, with plans for London and Miami in the coming months, aiming to be within a few hops of virtually every internet user.

6/14/2011

This post announces the launch of the Frankfurt data center, Cloudflare's 11th globally, which will improve performance for European internet traffic by servicing areas previously covered by Paris and Amsterdam. It also mentions upcoming data center deployments in Singapore, Miami, and London to reach a total of 14 core Internet exchange points by the end of Phase 2, with plans for Phase 3.

5/21/2011

This post announces the launch of Cloudflare's second European data center in Paris, France. This expansion aims to alleviate load from the existing Amsterdam data center and improve performance across Europe. The company also mentions plans to add data centers in Frankfurt and London in the near future.

5/18/2011

This post details the achievement of a sustained average of 2,000 page views per second, a significant milestone in Cloudflare's early growth. It describes the shift in traffic monitoring from manual log analysis to a global traffic display, inspired by Google's corporate history display, to visualize human, crawler, and threat traffic across the network.

5/13/2011

Upgraded Amsterdam data center hardware to custom machines, increasing capacity by at least 10x. Announced upcoming data center launches in Paris and Frankfurt, with London planned afterward, to cover major Western European internet exchange points.

5/12/2011

This post announces the launch of a new data center in Hong Kong, marking an expansion of Cloudflare's global network. It highlights the strategic importance of this location for serving traffic from Hong Kong and China, improving user experience, and mitigating DDoS attacks by distributing the load closer to the source of attacks. The post also mentions upcoming data center expansions in Paris and Dallas.

5/3/2011

Announces the launch of a new data center in New Jersey (EWR), aimed at improving performance for users in the Northeastern United States and offloading traffic from the Ashburn, VA facility. Mentions the use of the newest hardware and plans for further expansion into Dallas and Chicago.

4/25/2011

This post announces the launch of Cloudflare's sixth data center in Los Angeles (LAX). It highlights the data center's initial performance, processing over 30,000 requests in its first minute, and its role in offloading traffic from the busy San Jose data center. It also mentions the introduction of the second generation of Cloudflare's hardware stack in this new facility, with further details to be published later.

1/1/2011

This post announces the issuance of a new IP address range (173.245.48.0/20) that will be deployed soon, effectively doubling Cloudflare's IP address allocation. It also provides the updated list of public-facing IP ranges and advises users to upgrade configurations like mod_cloudflare to accommodate these changes. The announcement frames this as a precursor to a dramatic expansion of the Cloudflare network in the coming year.

9/2/2010

This post introduces the concept of Cloudflare's globally distributed DNS servers, personified as 'Ninja Nameservers'. It explains how these servers are crucial for the network's operation, enabling traffic routing and the delivery of performance and security benefits to websites. The post highlights the use of DNS as a core technology for Cloudflare's solution, contrasting it with traditional enterprise-level security and performance offerings.

9/2/2010

This post announces the addition of a new data center in San Jose, bringing the total to three. It explains the technical benefit of adding data centers: reducing latency by routing visitors to the geographically closest data center. It also highlights the performance boost this provides to websites and mentions the network engineer responsible for the setup.