Cloudflare

Cloudflare, Inc. is a United States–based web infrastructure and security company that operates a global content delivery network and provides services designed to improve website performance, security, and reliability. It was founded in 2009 by Matthew Prince, Lee Holloway, and Michelle Zatlyn, and is headquartered in San Francisco, California. The company operates a large network of data centers and serves as a reverse proxy for websites and applications, enabling traffic to pass through Cloudflare’s edge before reaching the origin server.

Cloudflare’s product portfolio includes a content delivery network (CDN), DDoS mitigation, and a globally distributed domain name system (DNS) with the 1.1.1.1 resolver. It also offers security features such as a Web Application Firewall (WAF), bot management, SSL/TLS termination, and zero-trust access and secure web gateway under its Cloudflare One platform. In addition, Cloudflare provides performance optimizations like Argo Smart Routing, Load Balancing, image optimization, and edge computing through Cloudflare Workers, as well as tooling for developers with Pages and D1, a serverless database.

Cloudflare operates an edge network spanning numerous data centers worldwide, enabling customers to route traffic through the edge for faster delivery and protection. The company has faced notable events, including the 2017 Cloudbleed incident, a memory leak vulnerability that exposed data on some sites, which Cloudflare later mitigated. Cloudflare went public in 2019 on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker NET. It maintains privacy commitments in its data-processing terms and privacy policy, including the 1.1.1.1 DNS resolver’s emphasis on user privacy.