On November 18, 2025, countless internet users experienced a sudden network paralysis. TV shows playing abruptly buffered or displayed errors.
Remote work meetings were unexpectedly interrupted.
Frequently used websites and applications became inaccessible.
The source of all this chaos pointed to a giant in internet infrastructure you may not have heard of, but rely on every day—Cloudflare.
On Tuesday, local time, Cloudflare issued a service issue warning on its official status page, confirming that its network had experienced a global outage. Although the engineering team responded quickly after discovering the problem and began to repair it, service gradually began to recover within a short period of time. These brief few tens of minutes were enough to make the global internet realize its importance.
Cloudflare History
This company, now hailed as the "Guardian of the Internet."
Cloudflare's origins lie in a community project called "Project Honey Pot."
This project aimed to track spammers, laying the foundation for Cloudflare's later powerful security capabilities.
In 2009, co-founders Matthew Prince and Lee Holloway developed this idea into a business plan in a competition at Harvard Business School. Their vision was simple: to make the internet faster and more secure.
In September 2010, Cloudflare was officially founded and launched its services.
It cleverly integrated Content Delivery Network (CDN) and Distributed Domain Name System (DNS) services, quickly attracting a large number of users with a disruptive "free + M&A" model.
Website owners could enjoy the benefits of acceleration and security protection for free simply by changing their DNS settings.
In the following decade, Cloudflare experienced explosive growth. It continuously expanded its global network, growing from a few cities to having nodes in tens of thousands of cities in over 120 countries. It also evolved from a CDN company into a comprehensive internet platform providing DDoS protection, Web Application Firewall (WAF), zero-trust network access, and other services.
Today, Cloudflare is deeply embedded in every corner of the internet, and its status far surpasses that of an ordinary technology company. It is more like the "nervous system" of the entire digital world, holding an unshakeable and vital position in today's digital world.
