Timeline of Cloudflare

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This is a timeline of Cloudflare, an American web infrastructure and website security company.

Big picture

Time period Development summary
2011 Cloudflare reaches 100 billion page views.[1]
2015 Cloudflare launches DNS, Web Security, and Web Performance.[1] The company raises US$110 million from investors.[2]
2016 Cloudflare launches Secure Registrar, Rate Limiting, and Load Balancing.[1]
2017 Cloudflare launches unmettered DDoS mitigation, IoT security, video services, and intelligent routing.[1]
2018 Cloudflare reaches 67,900 customers generating US$193 million in revenue. The company launches multi-protocol network performance and security, zero trust security, DNS resolver, and serverless platform.[1]
2019 Cloudflare launches distributed storage, layer 3/4 DDos mitigation, bot mitigation, and announces virtual private network.[1]


Full timeline

Year Month and date Event type Details
2009 July Founding Cloudflare is founded by Matthew Prince, Lee Holloway, and Michelle Zatlyn.[3][4][5]
2009 November Financial Cloudflare raises $2.1 million in a Series A round from Pelion Venture Partners and Venrock."[6]
2010 September Service launch Cloudflare is launched at the September 2010 TechCrunch Disrupt conference.[3][4]
2011 June Controversy Cloudflare receives media attention for providing security services to the website of LulzSec, a black hat hacking group.[3][7]
2011 July Financial Cloudflare raises US$20 million in a Series B round from New Enterprise Associates, Pelion Venture Partners, Venrock.[6][8][9]
2011 October Recognition The Wall Street Journal names Cloudflare the "Most Innovative Network & Internet Technology Company".[10][11]
2012 June Partnership Cloudflare partners with various web hosts, including HostPapa, to implement its "Railgun" technology: a web protocol intended to improve performance.[12][13]
2012 December Financial Cloudflare raises US$50 million in a Series C round from New Enterprise Associates, Pelion Venture Partners, Venrock, Union Square Ventures, and Greenspring Associates.[14][15]
2012 October Recognition The Wall Street Journal names Cloudflare for a second time as the "Most Innovative Network & Internet Technology Company".[10][11]
2012 Recognition Cloudflare is recognized by the World Economic Forum as a Technology Pioneer.[16]
2012 Recognition Fast Company ranks Cloudflare among the world's 10 most innovative companies.[17]
2013 March Cloudflare defends The Spamhaus Project from a DDoS attack that exceeds 300 Gbit/s. Akamai's chief architect states that at the time it is "the largest publicly announced DDoS attack in the history of the Internet".[18][19]
2014 February Security Cloudflare mitigates the largest ever recorded DDoS attack, which peaks at 400 Gigabits per second against an undisclosed customer.[20]
2014 February 24 Acquisition Cloudflare acquires StopTheHacker, which offers malware detection, automatic malware removal, and reputation and blacklist monitoring.[21][22]
2014 June 18 Acquisition Cloudflare acquires CryptoSeal, which provides Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) as a service.[22]
2014 November Security Cloudflare reports another massive DDoS attack with independent media sites being targeted at 500 Gbit/s.[23]
2014 Program launch Cloudflare introduces an effort called Project Galileo in response to cyberattacks against vulnerable online targets, such as artists, activists, journalists, and human rights groups. Project Galileo provides such groups with free services to protect their websites.[24][24]
2014 December Financial Cloudflare raises US$110 million in a Series D round led by Fidelity Investments, with participation from CapitalG, Microsoft, Qualcomm, and Baidu.[25]
2015 February Recognition Cloudflare is named "Best Enterprise Startup" by TechCrunch at the 8th Annual Crunchies Awards.[26]
2015 March 10 Product Cloudflare announces Virtual DNS, which provides DDoS mitigation and global distribution to DNS nameservers.[27]
2015 October Controversy A report finds that Cloudflare provisioned 40% of SSL certificates used by phishing sites with deceptive domain names resembling those of banks and payment processors.[28]
2015 November Controversy Hacktivist group Anonymous discourages the use of Cloudflare's services following the ISIL attacks in Paris and the renewed accusation that Cloudflare aids terrorists.[29]
2016 February 22 Product CloudFlare announces launch of its own domain name registrar service focused on security.[30][31][32]
2016 September Security A major Cloudflare bug (nicknamed Cloudbleed) starts leaking sensitive data, including passwords and authentication tokens, from customer websites by sending extra data in response to web requests.[33] The leaks result from a buffer overflow which occurred, according to analysis by Cloudflare, on approximately 1 in every 3,300,000 HTTP requests.[34][35]
2016 September 16 Recognition Forbes Cloud 100 ranks Cloudflare 11th on its list of top 100 cloud companies.[36][37][38]
2016 September 29 Product Cloudflare launches its Rate Limiting, which allows customers to rate limit, shape or block traffic based on the number of requests per second per IP, cookie, or authentication token.[39]
2016 December 13 Acquisition Cloudflare acquires Eager, which provides a free platform enabling non-technical website owners to install client-side plugins to improve their websites.[40][22]
2017 January Userbase As of date Cloudflare provides DNS services to 12 million websites.[41] adding approximately 20,000 new customers every day.[42]
2017 August 6 Expulsion Breaking with its long-standing policy of total content neutrality, Cloudflare ceases providing services to the neo-Nazi, white supremacist, and Holocaust denial commentary and message board website The Daily Stormer on August 16, 2017, in the aftermath of the fatal vehicular attack at the Charlottesville rally four days earlier. This dropps the website's protection against DDoS attacks, and soon thereafter attackers take down the website.[43]
2017 November 14 Acquisition Cloudflare acquires Neumob, a mobile VPN startup.[44][22]
2018 April 1 Product Cloudflare announces a 'privacy-first' consumer DNS service, hosted at IP addresses 1.1.1.1 and 1.0.0.1. Alternatively, the service can be accessed via IPv6 at 2606:4700:4700::1111 and 2606:4700:4700::1001.[45][46]
2018 November 1 Product Cloudflare announces a mobile version of their 1.1.1.1 service for iOS and Android.[47]
2019 March Financial Cloudflare raises US$150 million in a Series E round, led by Franklin Templeton Investments, with participation from New Enterprise Associates, Union Square Ventures, Venrock, Pelion Venture Partners, Greenspring Associates, CapitalG, Microsoft, Baidu, Qualcomm and Fidelity.[48]
2019 April 1 Product Cloudflare announces a new freemium Virtual Private Network service named Warp. The service would initially be available through the 1.1.1.1 mobile apps with a desktop app available later.[49]
2019 June 21 Security Cloudflare announces that users would be able to sync their computer's time securely with Cloudflare's Network Time Protocol (NTP) service. Cloudflare's time service would allow users to connect to their NTP server that supports Network Time Security (NTS), enabling users to obtain time in an authenticated manner.[50]
2019 July Cloudflare suffers a major outage, which renders more than 12 million websites (80% of all customers) unreachable for 27 minutes.[51]
2019 August 15 Financial Cloudflare submits its S-1 filing for IPO on the New York Stock Exchange under the stock ticker NET.[52]
2019 August Expulsion Cloudflare terminates services to 8chan, an American imageboard, after the perpetrator of the 2019 El Paso shootings allegedly used the website to upload his manifesto.[53][54]
2019 August Personnel As of date, Cloudflare has around 1,069 employees.[1]
2019 September 11 Recognition Forbes Cloud 100 ranks Cloudflare 11th on its list of top 100 cloud companies.[55]
2019 Product Cloudflare announces a new domain registrar service that promises to offer low-cost wholesale pricing and easy ways to enable DNSSEC.

Numerical and visual data

Google Scholar

The following table summarizes per-year mentions on Google Scholar as of December 14, 2021.

Year Cloudflare
2009 7
2010 11
2011 17
2012 47
2013 156
2014 280
2015 418
2016 496
2017 664
2018 805
2019 1,230
2020 1,610
Cloudflare gscho.png

Google Trends

The image below shows Google Trends data for Cloudflare (Internet Company) from January 2009 to January 2021, when the screenshot was taken.[56]

Cloudflare gt.jpeg

The chart below shows Google Trends data comparing Cloudflare (Search term) with other CDN providers: Fastly (Search term) and Akamai (Search term), from January 2004 to February 2021, when the screenshot was taken. Interest is also ranked by country and displayed on world map.[57]

Cloudflare compared gt.jpeg

Google Ngram Viewer

The chart below shows Google Ngram Viewer data for Cloudflare from 2009 to 2019 [58]

Cloudflare ngramm.jpeg

Wikipedia Views

The chart below shows pageviews of the English Wikipedia article Cloudflare on desktop, mobile-web, desktop-spider, mobile-web-spider and mobile app, from July 2015; to December 2020.[59]

Cloudflare wv.jpeg


Meta information on the timeline

How the timeline was built

The initial version of the timeline was written by User:Sebastian.

Funding information for this timeline is available.

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What the timeline is still missing

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See also

External links

References

  1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 1.5 1.6 "Cloudflare S-1 Analysis — Do they have an edge?". medium.com. Retrieved 13 October 2019. 
  2. ↑ "Cloudflare plans big IPO". infotechlead.com. Retrieved 14 October 2019. 
  3. ↑ 3.0 3.1 3.2 Henderson, Nicole (June 17, 2011). "Cloudflare Gets an Unusual Endorsement from Hacker Group LulzSec". Webhost Industry Review. Archived from the original on September 9, 2017. Retrieved August 21, 2019. 
  4. ↑ 4.0 4.1 "Our Story". Cloudflare. Retrieved August 22, 2019. 
  5. ↑ "Cloudflare Beta". Project Honey Pot. Archived from the original on December 4, 2017. Retrieved August 22, 2019. 
  6. ↑ 6.0 6.1 "CloudFlare". Crunchbase. Retrieved August 22, 2019. 
  7. ↑ Hesseldahl, Arik (2011-06-10). "Web Security Start-Up Cloudflare Gets Buzz, Courtesy of LulzSec Hackers". All Things Digital. Retrieved 2011-08-15. 
  8. ↑ Hesseldahl, Arik (July 12, 2011). "Web Security Start-Up Cloudflare Lands $20 Million Funding Round". AllThingsD. Retrieved August 22, 2019. 
  9. ↑ Milian, Mark (December 18, 2012). "Why a Fast-Growing Startup Tries to Keep Its Venture Funding Secret". Bloomblerg Technology. Bloomberg News. Retrieved August 22, 2019. 
  10. ↑ 10.0 10.1 Wang, Shirley S.; Totty, Michael (October 17, 2011). "And the Rest of the Winners Are...". The Wall Street Journal. ISSN 0099-9660. Retrieved August 22, 2019. 
  11. ↑ 11.0 11.1 "WSJ: CloudFlare Named Most Innovative Internet & Networking Company, Second Year in a Row". The Cloudflare Blog. October 15, 2012. Retrieved August 22, 2019. 
  12. ↑ Clark, Jack (March 1, 2013). "Cloudflare's Railgun protocol gets buy-in from web giants". The Register. Retrieved October 8, 2015. 
  13. ↑ Lardinois, Frederic (February 26, 2013). "Cloudflare Partners With World's Leading Web Hosts To Implement Its Railgun Protocol, Speeds Up Load Times By Up To 143%". TechCrunch. Retrieved February 12, 2016. 
  14. ↑ Crook, Jordan (December 17, 2013). "Cloudflare Reveals $50M Round From Union Square Ventures". TechCrunch. Retrieved August 22, 2019. 
  15. ↑ Hickins, Michael (December 17, 2013). "Cloudflare Raised $50M, Ready to Spend". The Wall Street Journal. Retrieved August 22, 2019. 
  16. ↑ "Technology Pioneer 2012 - Matthew Prince, Michelle Zatlyn & Lee Holloway (Cloudflare)". World Economic Forum. Archived from the original on April 2, 2015. Retrieved March 10, 2015. 
  17. ↑ "Most Innovative Companies 2012 - Industries Top 10 - Web/Internet". Fast Company. February 10, 2012. Retrieved March 10, 2015. 
  18. ↑ Storm, Darlene (March 27, 2013). "Biggest DDoS attack in history slows Internet, breaks record at 300 Gbps". Computerworld. Retrieved 13 October 2019. 
  19. ↑ Markoff, John; Perlroth, Nicole (March 26, 2013). "Online Dispute Becomes Internet-Snarling Attack". The New York Times. Retrieved August 22, 2019. 
  20. ↑ Schwartz, Mathew J. (February 11, 2014). "DDoS Attack Hits 400 Gbit/s, Breaks Record". Dark Reading. Retrieved August 22, 2019. 
  21. ↑ Lardinois, Frederic (February 24, 2014). "Cloudflare Acquires Anti-Malware Firm StopTheHacker". TechCrunch. Retrieved 13 October 2019. 
  22. ↑ 22.0 22.1 22.2 22.3 "Cloudflare". crunchbase.com. Retrieved 13 October 2019. 
  23. ↑ Olson, Parmy (November 20, 2014). "The Largest Cyber Attack In History Has Been Hitting Hong Kong Sites". Forbes. Retrieved 13 October 2019. 
  24. ↑ 24.0 24.1 Newman, Lily Hay (June 12, 2019). "Cloudflare's Five-Year Project to Protect Nonprofits Online". Wired. ISSN 1059-1028. Retrieved August 5, 2019. 
  25. ↑ Miller, Ron (September 22, 2015). "Cloudflare Hints IPO Could Be Coming, But Not This Year". TechCrunch. Retrieved 14 October 2019. 
  26. ↑ "8th Annual Crunchies Awards". TechCrunch. February 5, 2015. Retrieved 14 October 2019. 
  27. ↑ Grant, Dani. "Announcing Virtual DNS: DDoS Mitigation and Global Distribution for DNS Traffic". blog.cloudflare.com. Retrieved 13 October 2019. 
  28. ↑ Edgecombe, Graham (October 12, 2015). "Certificate authorities issue SSL certificates to fraudsters". Netcraft. Retrieved 14 October 2019. 
  29. ↑ Hern, Alex (November 19, 2015). "Web services firm Cloudflare accused by Anonymous of helping Isis". The Guardian. Retrieved 14 October 2019. 
  30. ↑ "CloudFlare Launches Domain Name Registrar Focused on Security". news.softpedia.com. Retrieved 13 October 2019. 
  31. ↑ "Introducing CloudFlare Registrar: Designed for Security, Not the Masses". blog.cloudflare.com. Retrieved 14 October 2019. 
  32. ↑ "CloudFlare to launch its own 'high security' web domain registrar". theregister.co.uk. Retrieved 14 October 2019. 
  33. ↑ Conger, Kate (February 23, 2017). "Major Cloudflare bug leaked sensitive data from customers' websites". TechCrunch. Retrieved August 22, 2019. 
  34. ↑ Steinberg, Joseph (February 24, 2017). "Why You Can Ignore Calls To Change Your Passwords After Today's Massive Password Leak Announcement". Inc. Retrieved 14 October 2019. 
  35. ↑ Molina, Brett (February 28, 2017). "Cloudfare bug: Yes, you should change your passwords". USA Today. Retrieved 14 October 2019. 
  36. ↑ "Forbes Releases First List of Top 100 Cloud Companies + 20 Rising Stars". finsmes.com. Retrieved 13 October 2019. 
  37. ↑ "Cloud 100 2016". Forbes. Archived from the original on April 29, 2017. Retrieved 13 October 2019. 
  38. ↑ "Cloud 100 2017". Forbes. Archived from the original on September 3, 2018. Retrieved 13 October 2019. 
  39. ↑ "Control your traffic at the edge with Cloudflare". blog.cloudflare.com. Retrieved 13 October 2019. 
  40. ↑ Yeung, Ken (December 13, 2016). "Cloudflare acquires app platform Eager, will sunset service in Q1 2017". VentureBeat. Retrieved 13 October 2019. 
  41. ↑ Arnfeld, Tom (April 11, 2017). "How we made our DNS stack 3x faster". The Cloudflare Blog. Retrieved August 22, 2019. 
  42. ↑ Karaivanova, Maria (December 22, 2016). "Cloudflare – Making Your Website Fast, Safe, and Accessible Everywhere in the World". Interview with Jackie Goldstein. Retrieved August 22, 2019. 
  43. ↑ Peterson, Becky (August 17, 2017). "Cloudflare CEO explains his emotional decision to punt The Daily Stormer and subject it to hackers: I woke up 'in a bad mood and decided to kick them off the Internet'". Business Insider. Retrieved 14 October 2019. 
  44. ↑ Miller, Ron (November 14, 2017). "Cloudflare expands into mobile performance with Neumob acquisition". TechCrunch. Archived from the original on December 3, 2018. Retrieved April 2, 2019. 
  45. ↑ Prince, Matthew (April 1, 2018). "Anouncing 1.1.1.1: the fastest, privacy-first consumer DNS service". The Cloudflare Blog. Retrieved 14 October 2019. 
  46. ↑ Armasu, Lucian (April 2, 2018). "Cloudflare Launches Privacy-Focused 1.1.1.1 DNS Service". Tom's Hardware. Retrieved 14 October 2019. 
  47. ↑ Cimpanu, Catalin (November 11, 2018). "Cloudflare launches Android and iOS apps for its 1.1.1.1 service". ZDNet. Retrieved 14 October 2019. 
  48. ↑ Kawamoto, Dawn (March 12, 2019). "Cloudflare's $150 million funding round puts its IPO plans in question". San Francisco Business Times. Retrieved March 12, 2019. 
  49. ↑ Rambo, Guilherme (April 1, 2019). "Cloudflare announces Warp: a new free VPN service for iOS". 9to5Mac. Archived from the original on April 2, 2019. Retrieved April 2, 2019. 
  50. ↑ "Cloudflare Time Services". Cloudflare. Retrieved 14 October 2019. 
  51. ↑ Graham-Cumming, John (July 12, 2019). "Details of the Cloudflare outage on July 2, 2019". The Cloudflare Blog. Retrieved 14 October 2019. 
  52. ↑ Shieber, Jonathan (August 15, 2019). "Cloudflare files for initial public offering". TechCrunch. Retrieved 14 October 2019. 
  53. ↑ Prince, Matthew (August 5, 2019). "Terminating Service for 8Chan". The Cloudflare Blog. Retrieved 14 October 2019. 
  54. ↑ Wong, Julia Carrie (August 4, 2019). "Investigators 'reasonably confident' Texas suspect left anti-immigrant screed". NBC News. Retrieved August 22, 2019. 
  55. ↑ "The Cloud 100". forbes.com. Retrieved 14 October 2019. 
  56. ↑ "Cloudflare". trends.google.com. Retrieved 15 January 2021. 
  57. ↑ "Fastly, Cloudflare and Akamai". Google Trends. Retrieved 20 February 2021. 
  58. ↑ "Cloudflare". books.google.com. Retrieved 31 January 2021. 
  59. ↑ "Cloudflare". wikipediaviews.org. Retrieved 19 January 2021. 
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