Cloudflare
cloudflare.comFounding Story
Cloudflare, Inc., is an American technology company headquartered in San Francisco, California, that provides a range of internet services, including content delivery network (CDN) services, cloud cybersecurity, DDoS mitigation, and ICANN-accredited domain registration. The company's services act primarily as a reverse proxy between website visitors and a customer's hosting provider, improving performance and protecting against malicious traffic.
Key Milestones
Cloudflare was founded in 2009 by Matthew Prince, Lee Holloway, and Michelle Zatlyn.
Since 2010, Cloudflare has collaborated with the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children to provide data, files, and supplemental investigation from abuse reports observed on its network.
Cloudflare received media attention in June 2011 for providing DDoS mitigation for the website of LulzSec, a black hat hacking group.
On June 1, 2012, the hacker group UGNazi compromised some of Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince's accounts and redirected visitors of the website 4chan to a Twitter account belonging to UGNazi.
In March 2013, The Spamhaus Project was targeted by a DDoS attack that Cloudflare reported exceeded 300 gigabits per second (Gbit/s).
Cloudflare has acquired web-services and security companies, including StopTheHacker (February 2014), CryptoSeal (June 2014), Eager Platform Co.
In 2017, Cloudflare launched Cloudflare Workers, a serverless computing platform for creating new applications, augmenting existing ones, without configuring or maintaining infrastructure.
In 2018, Cloudflare was identified by the European Union's Counterfeit and Piracy Watch List as a "notorious market" which engages in, facilitates, or benefits from counterfeiting and piracy.