Cloudflare launched 15 years ago this week. We like to celebrate our birthday by announcing new products and features that give back to the Internet, which we’ll do a lot of this week. But, on this occasion, we've also been thinking about what's changed on the Internet over the last 15 years and what has not.

With some things there's been clear progress: when we launched in 2010 less than 10 percent of the Internet was encrypted, today well over 95 percent is encrypted. We're proud of the role we played in making that happen.

Some other areas have seen limited progress: IPv6 adoption has grown steadily but painfully slowly over the last 15 years, in spite of our efforts. That's a problem because as IPv4 addresses have become scarce and expensive it’s held back new entrants and driven up the costs of things like networking and cloud computing.

Still other things have remained remarkably consistent: the basic business model of the Internet has for the last 15 years been the same — create compelling content, find a way to be discovered, and then generate value from the resulting traffic. Whether that was through ads or subscriptions or selling things or just the ego of knowing that someone is consuming what you created, traffic generation has been the engine that powered the Internet we know today.

Make no mistake, the Internet has never been free. There's always been a reward system that transferred value from consumers to creators and, in doing so, filled the Internet with content. Had the Internet not had that reward system it wouldn't be nearly as vibrant as it is today.

A bit of a trivia aside: why did Cloudflare never build an ad blocker despite many requests? Because, as imperfect as they are, ads have been the only micropayment system that has worked at scale to encourage an open Internet while also compensating content creators for their work. Our mission is to help build a better Internet, and a core value is that we’re principled, so we weren’t going to hamper the Internet’s fundamental business model.

But that same traffic-based reward system has also created many of the problems we lament about the current state of the Internet. Traffic has always been an imperfect proxy for value. Over the last 15 years we've watched more of the Internet driven by annoying clickbait or dangerous ragebait. Entire media organizations have built their businesses with a stated objective of writing headlines to generate the maximum cortisol response because that's what generates the maximum amount of traffic.

Over the years, Cloudflare has at times faced calls for us to intervene and control what content can be published online. As an infrastructure provider, we've never felt we were the right place for those editorial decisions to be made. But it wasn't because we didn't worry about the direction the traffic-incentivized Internet seemed to be headed. It always seemed like what fundamentally needed to change was not more content moderation at the infrastructure level but instead a healthier incentive system for content creation.

Today the conditions to bring about that change may be happening. In the last year, something core to the Internet we’ve all known has changed. It's being driven by AI and it has an opportunity with some care and nurturing to help bring about what we think may be a much better Internet.

What’s the change? The primary discovery system of the Internet for the last 15 years has been Search Engines. They scraped the Internet's content, built an index, and then presented users with a treasure map which they followed generating traffic. Content creators were happy to let Search Engines scrape their content because there were a limited number of them, so the infrastructure costs were relatively low and, more importantly, because the Search Engines gave something to sites in the form of traffic — the Internet’s historic currency — sent back to sites.

It’s already clear that the Internet’s discovery system for the next 15 years will be something different: Answer Engines. Unlike Search Engines which gave you a map where you hunted for what you were looking for, driving traffic in the process, Answer Engines just give you the answer without you having to click on anything. For 95 percent of users 95 percent of the time, that is a better user experience.

You don’t have to look far to see this is changing rapidly before our eyes. ChatGPT, Anthropic’s Claude, and other AI startups aren’t Search Engines — they’re Answer Engines. Even Google, the search stalwart, is increasingly serving “AI Overviews” in place of 10 blue links. We can often look to sci-fi movies to have a glimpse into our most likely future. In them, the helpful intelligent robot character didn’t answer questions with: “Here are some links you can click on to maybe find what you’re looking for.” Whether you like it or not, the future will increasingly be answers not searches.

In the short term, this is going to be extremely painful for some industries that are built based on monetizing traffic. It already is. While ecommerce and social applications haven't yet seen a significant drop in traffic as the world switches to Answer Engines, media companies have. Why the difference? Well, for the former, you still need to buy the thing the Answer Engine recommends and, for now, we still value talking with other humans.

But for media companies, if the Answer Engine gives you the summary of what you’re looking for in most cases you don’t need to read the story. And the loss of traffic for media companies has already been dramatic. It’s not just traditional media. Research groups at investment banks, industry analysts, major consulting firms — they’re all seeing major drops in people finding their content because we are increasingly getting answers not search treasure maps.

Some say these answer engines or agents are just acting on behalf of humans. Sure but so what? Without a change they will still kill content creators’ businesses. If you ask your agent to summarize twenty different news sources but never actually visit any of them you’re still undermining the business model of those news sources. Agents don’t click on ads. And if those agents are allowed to aggregate information on behalf of multiple users it’s an even bigger problem because then subscription revenue is eliminated as well. Why subscribe to the Wall Street Journal or New York Times or Financial Times or Washington Post if my agent can free ride off some other user who does?

Unless you believe that content creators should work for free, or that they are somehow not needed anymore — both of which are naive assumptions — something needs to change. A visit from an agent isn’t the same as a visit from a human and therefore should have different rules of the road. If nothing changes, the drop in human traffic to the media ecosystem writ large will kill the business model that has built the content-rich Internet we enjoy today.

We think that’s an existential threat to one of humanity’s most important creations: the Internet.

But there’s reason for optimism. Content is the fuel that powers every AI system and the companies that run those AI systems know ultimately they need to financially support the ecosystem. Because of that it seems potentially we're on the cusp of a new, better, and maybe healthier Internet business model. As content creators use tools like the ones provided by Cloudflare to restrict AI robots from taking their content without compensation, we're already seeing a market emerge and better deals being struck between AI and content companies.

What's most interesting is what content companies are getting the best deals. It's not the ragebait headline writers. It's not the news organizations writing yet another take on what's going on in politics. It's not the spammy content farms full of drivel. Instead, it's Reddit and other quirky corners that best remind us of the Internet of old. For those of you old enough, think back to the Internet not of the last 15 years but of the last 35. We’ve lost some of what made that early Internet great, but there are indications that we might finally have the incentives to bring more of it back.

It seems increasingly likely that in our future, AI-driven Internet — assuming the AI companies are willing to step up, support the ecosystem, and pay for the content that is the most valuable to them — it’s the creative, local, unique, original content that’ll be worth the most. And, if you’re like us, the thing you as an Internet consumer are craving more of is creative, local, unique, original content. And, it turns out, having talked with many of them, that’s the content that content creators are most excited to create.

So how will the business model work? Well, for the first time in history, we have a pretty good mathematical representation of human knowledge. Sum up all the LLMs and that's what you get. It's not perfect, but it's pretty good. Inherently, the same mathematical model serves as a map for the gaps in human knowledge. Like a block of Swiss Cheese — there's a lot of cheese, but there's also a lot of holes.

Imagine a future business model of the Internet that doesn't reward traffic-generating ragebait but instead rewards those content creators that help fill in the holes in our collective metaphorical cheese. That will involve some portion of the subscription fees AI companies collect, and some portion of the revenue from the ads they'll inevitably serve, going back to content creators who most enrich the collective knowledge.

As a rough and simplistic sketch, think of it as some number of dollars per AI company’s monthly active users going into a collective pool to be distributed out to content creators based on what most fills in the holes in the cheese.

You could imagine an AI company suggesting back to creators that they need more created about topics they may not have enough content about. Say, for example, the carrying capacity of unladened swallows because they know their subscribers of a certain age and proclivity are always looking for answers about that topic. The very pruning algorithms the AI companies use today form a roadmap for what content is worth enough to not be pruned but paid for.

While today the budget items that differentiate AI companies are how much they can afford to spend on GPUs and top talent, as those things inevitably become more and more commodities it seems likely what will differentiate the different AIs is their access to creative, local, unique, original content. And the math of their algorithms provides them a map of what’s worth the most. While there are a lot of details to work out, those are the ingredients you need for a healthy market.

As we think about our role at Cloudflare in this developing market, it's not about protecting the status quo but instead helping catalyze a better business model for the future of Internet content creation. That means creating a level playing field. Ideally there should be lots of AI companies, large and small, and lots of content creators, large and small.

It can’t be that a new entrant AI company is at a disadvantage to a legacy search engine because one has to pay for content but the other gets it for free. But it’s also critical to realize that the right solution to that current conundrum isn’t that no one pays, it’s that, new or old, everyone who benefits from the ecosystem should contribute back to it based on their relative size.

It may seem impossibly idealistic today, but the good news is that based on the conversations we’ve had we’re confident if a few market participants tip — whether because they step up and do the right thing or are compelled — we will see the entire market tipping and becoming robust very quickly.

We can't do this alone and we have no plans to try to. Our mission is not to “build a better Internet” but to “help build a better Internet.” The solutions developed to facilitate this market need to be open, collaborative, standardized, and shared across many organizations. We’ll take some encouraging steps in that direction with announcements on partnerships and collaborations this week. And we’re proud to be a leader in this space.

The Internet is an ecosystem and we, other infrastructure providers, along with most importantly both AI companies and content creators, will be critical in ensuring that ecosystem is healthy. We’re excited to partner with those who are ready to step up and do their part to also help build a better Internet. It is possible.

And we're optimistic that if others can collaborate in supporting the ecosystem we may be at the cusp of a new golden age of the Internet. Our conversations with the leading AI companies nearly all acknowledge that they have a responsibility to give back to the ecosystem and compensate content creators. Confirming this, the largest publishers are reporting they're having much more constructive conversations about licensing their content to those AI companies. And, this week, we'll be announcing new tools to help even the smallest publishers take back control of who can use what they've created.

It may seem impossible. We think it’s a no-brainer. We're proud of what Cloudflare has accomplished over the last 15 years, but there’s a lot left to do to live up to our mission. So, more than ever, it's clear: giddy up, because we're just getting started!

That said, one thing that is different is you may have noticed we've actually had fewer public innovation weeks over the last year than usual. That's been because a couple of incidents nearly a year ago caused us to focus on improving our internal systems over releasing new features. We're incredibly proud of our team's focus to make security, resilience, and reliability the top priorities for the last year. Today, Cloudflare's underlying platform, and the products that run on top of it, are significantly more robust than ever before.

With that work largely complete, and our platform in its strongest shape ever, we plan to pick back up the usual cadence of new product launches that we're known for. This Birthday Week, you'll see many as we roll out performance improvements only our Connectivity Cloud can deliver to accelerate all our customers' websites by a mind-blowing 45 percent (automatically and for free), launch new features to make our developer platform faster and easier to use, plug the web's last encryption hole, accelerate AI inference globally, provide new levels of support for startups and the open source community, and much much more.

This is easily our favorite week of the year because of how it allows our team to give back to the Internet and live up to our mission.

The robustness of Cloudflare's platform today contrasts with what feels like an Internet that has become far more fragile over the previous year. When we first articulated our mission as helping build a better Internet, we assumed that “better” meant one that was faster, more reliable, more secure, more private, and more efficient. But today it seems like something more fundamental.

The last year has been characterized by a normalization of Internet shutdowns and limits on Internet access around the world. What were once tactics reserved for authoritarian regimes have spread to even Western democratic nations, where courts and legislatures have been emboldened to restrict fundamental protocols to control perceived harms.

We’ve seen a dramatic uptick in courts of limited jurisdiction ordering sites they found objectionable blocked globally at the DNS level, nations turning off the Internet for most their citizens in the name of preventing cheating on standardized tests (while it remains on in wealthy and politically connected neighborhoods), ISPs proposing legislation to impose new taxes on content creators, and whole services being banned in countries that had previously declared that more Internet was always better than less. 

This is, unfortunately, a dark time in the history of the Internet.

At the same time, the business model of the web is eroding. The quid pro quo of the web’s last era — the search era — was that you let a company like Google scrape data from your website in exchange for them sending you traffic. In that model, content creators could then generate value from that traffic through ads, selling products, or just getting the ego boost of knowing that someone cares enough about the thing you created to take the time to view it.

That same quid pro quo does not hold up in the era we’re moving into — the AI era — where answers are delivered to questions without ever having to visit the authoritative source. And, if content creators can no longer generate value from their creations, it’s inevitable they’ll generate less content and we’ll all, including the AI companies that need original content to train their models, lose out as a result.

The Internet remains a miracle, but it no longer feels inevitable. It is under attack from active adversaries and beginning to rot from benign neglect. And, with the largest tech companies distracted by their own regulatory challenges, it finds itself without a clear champion. We’re proud of our team for picking up that mantle. At Cloudflare, we believe in the Internet and we will fight for it.

That's why we invest in our public policy team to educate lawmakers and jurists on how best to control the harms created by some limited corners of the Internet without destabilizing its underlying protocols. Why we believe it’s important to provide so many of our services for free. And it's why this Birthday Week we'll announce new ways for the AI systems that hunger for original content to compensate content creators in a way that is equitable. Without a new paradigm, we worry that the incentives that allowed the Internet to flourish will shrivel and its miracle will fade.

Missions matter. Ours is to help build a better Internet. We, or one of our senior executives, still talk to every candidate we hire before extending an offer because we want to ensure we communicate the importance of our mission. One of the most common questions we’re asked is how we plan to preserve Cloudflare's culture? Our answer is always the same: the goal isn't how to preserve our culture, it's always how to improve it. The same has to be true for the Internet. We can't just try to preserve the past, we need to imagine new ways to improve it.

That requires champions to stand up and imagine a better Internet. It’s been too long since you’ve read a positive story about the Internet even though it continues to be a miracle. We are proud that we have the team, platform, and mantle to not just preserve, but improve on, that miracle. It is our mission and what motivates everything we do at Cloudflare. And nowhere is that more on display than during the week ahead. If you too are inspired by our mission, we encourage you to apply to join our team.

Stay tuned for an incredible Birthday Week of new products that make progress on our mission. Thank you to our team around the world for everything you do. Cloudflare is stronger because of the work we've accomplished, and the Internet will be stronger because of Cloudflare.

Cloudflare is officially a teenager. We launched on September 27, 2010. Today we celebrate our thirteenth birthday. As is our tradition, we use the week of our birthday to launch products that we think of as our gift back to the Internet. More on some of the incredible announcements in a second, but we wanted to start by talking about something more fundamental: our identity.

Like many kids, it took us a while to fully understand who we are. We chafed at being put in boxes. People would describe Cloudflare as a security company, and we'd say, "That's not all we do." They'd say we were a network, and we'd object that we were so much more. Worst of all, they'd sometimes call us a "CDN," and we'd remind them that caching is a part of any sensibly designed system, but it shouldn't be a feature unto itself. Thank you very much.

And so, yesterday, the day before our thirteenth birthday, we announced to the world finally what we realized we are: a connectivity cloud.

What does that mean? "Connectivity" means we measure ourselves by connecting people and things together. Our job isn't to be the final destination for your data, but to help it move and flow. Any application, any data, anyone, anywhere, anytime — that's the essence of connectivity, and that’s always been the promise of the Internet.

"Cloud" means the batteries are included. It scales with you. It’s programmable. Has consistent security built in. It’s intelligent and learns from your usage and others' and optimizes for outcomes better than you ever could on your own.

Our connectivity cloud is worth contrasting against some other clouds. The so-called hyperscale public clouds are, in many ways, the opposite. They optimize for hoarding your data. Locking it in. Making it difficult to move. They are captivity clouds. And, while they may be great for some things, their full potential will only truly be unlocked for customers when combined with a connectivity cloud that lets you mix and match the best of each of their features.

That's what we're seeing from the hottest startups these days. Many of the leading AI companies are using Cloudflare's connectivity cloud to move their training data to wherever there's excess GPU capacity. We estimate that across the AI startup ecosystem, Cloudflare is the most commonly used cloud provider. Because, if you're building the future, you know connectivity and the agility of the cloud are key.

We've spent the last year listening to our AI customers and trying to understand what the future of AI will look like and how we can better help them build it. Today, we're releasing a series of products and features borne of those conversations and opening incredible new opportunities.

The biggest opportunity in AI is inference. Inference is what happens when you type a prompt to write a poem about your love of connectivity clouds into ChatGPT and, seconds later, get a coherent response. Or when you run a search for a picture of your passport on your phone, and it immediately pulls it up.

The models that power those modern miracles take significant time to generate — a process called training. Once trained though, they can have new data fed through them over and over to generate valuable new output.

Before today, those models could run in two places. The first was the end user's device — like in the case of the search for “passport” in the photos on your phone. When that's possible it's great. It's fast. Your private data stays local. And it works even when there's no network access. But it's also challenging. Models are big and the storage on your phone or other local device is limited. Moreover, putting the fastest GPU resources to process these models in your phone makes the phone expensive and burns precious battery resources.

The alternative has been the centralized public cloud. This is what’s used for a big model like OpenAI’s GPT-4, which runs services like ChatGPT. But that has its own challenges. Today, nearly all the GPU resources for AI are deployed in the US — a fact that rightfully troubles the rest of the world. As AI queries get more personal, sending them all to some centralized cloud is a potential security and data locality disaster waiting to happen. Moreover, it's inherently slow and less efficient and therefore more costly than running the inference locally.

Running on the device is too small. Running on the centralized public cloud is too far. It’s like the story of “Goldilocks and the Three Bears”: the right answer is somewhere in between. That's why today we're excited to be rolling out modern GPU resources across Cloudflare's global connectivity cloud. The third place for AI inference. Not too small. Not too far. The perfect step in between. By the end of the year, you'll be able to run AI models in more than 100 cities in 40+ countries where Cloudflare operates. By the end of 2024, we plan to have inference-tuned GPUs deployed in nearly every city that makes up Cloudflare's global network and within milliseconds of nearly every device connected to the Internet worldwide.

(A brief shout out for the Cloudflare team members who are, as of this moment, literally dragging suitcases full of NVIDIA GPU cards around the world and installing them in the servers that make up our network worldwide. It takes a lot of atoms to move all the bits that we do, and it takes intrepid people spanning the globe to update our network to facilitate these new capabilities.)

Running AI in a connectivity cloud like Cloudflare gives you the best of both worlds: nearly boundless resources running locally near any device connected to the Internet. And we've made it flexible to run whatever models a developer creates, easy to use without needing a dev ops team, and inexpensive to run where you only pay for when we're doing inference work for you.

To make this tangible, think about a Cloudflare customer that makes consumer wearable devices. They make devices that need to be smart but also affordable and have the longest possible battery life. As explorers rely on them literally to navigate out of harrowing conditions, tradeoffs aren't an option. That's why, when they heard about Cloudflare Workers AI, they immediately knew it was something they needed to try. The promise is powerful devices that are still affordable and have great battery life while still respecting users’ privacy and security.

They are one of the limited set of customers we gave an early sneak peek to, all of whom immediately started running off ideas of what they could do next and clamoring to get more access. We feel like we’ve seen it and are here to report: the not-so-distant future is super cool.

Over the years we've announced several things on our birthday that have gone on to change the future of the Internet. On our first birthday, we announced an IPv6 gateway that has helped the Internet scale past its early protocol decisions. On our fourth birthday, we announced that we were making encryption free and doubled the size of the encrypted web in a day. On our seventh birthday, we launched the Workers platform that has revolutionized how modern applications are developed. On our eleventh birthday we announced R2 and further freed data from the captivity clouds.

This year, as we celebrate Cloudflare's thirteenth birthday, we set out to have as dramatic an impact on AI development as we have in other areas we've focused on in the past: providing tools that bring affordable, powerful AI inference to anyone, anywhere on Earth.

And so, to commemorate that, let's close with a poem about the connectivity cloud. This one was generated using a tiny bit of code and Meta's Llama 2 LLM model running on Cloudflare's Workers AI platform in a data center not far from where we're writing this…

Prompt: “Write a poem that talks about the connectivity cloud and contrast it with the captivity cloud”

The connectivity cloud, a wondrous sight to see,

Where data flows and knowledge is set free,

A place where minds meet and ideas take flight,

A world of endless possibility in sight.

But then there's the captivity cloud, a darker place,

Where thoughts are trapped and minds are in disgrace,

A prison of the mind, where freedom's lost,

A world of endless sorrow and cost.

So let us choose the connectivity cloud,

And let our minds be free and allowed,

To soar and glide and reach for the sky,

And never be held back, but always fly.

Cloudflare is raising prices for the first time in the last 12 years. Beginning January 15, 2023, new sign-ups will be charged \$25 per month for our Pro Plan (up from \$20 per month) and \$250 per month for our Business Plan (up from \$200 per month). Any paying customers who sign up before January 15, 2023, including any currently paying customers who signed up at any point over the last 12 years, will stay at the old monthly price until May 14, 2023.

We are also introducing an option to pay annually, rather than monthly, that we hope most customers will choose to switch to. Annual plans are available today and discounted from the new monthly rate to \$240 per year for the Pro Plan (the equivalent of \$20 per month, saving \$60 per year) and \$2,400 per year for the Business Plan (the equivalent of \$200 per month, saving \$600 per year). In other words, if you choose to pay annually for Cloudflare you can lock in our old monthly prices.

After not raising prices in our history, this was something we thought carefully about before deciding to do. While we have over a decade of network expansion and innovation under our belts, what may not be intuitive is that our goal is not to increase revenue from this change. We need to invest up front in building out our network, and the main reason we're making this change is to more closely map our business with the timing of our underlying costs. Doing so will enable us to further accelerate our network expansion and pace of innovation — which all of our customers will benefit from. Since this is a big change for us, I wanted to take the time to walk through how we came to this decision.

Cloudflare launched on September 27, 2010. At the time we had two plans: one Free Plan that was free, and a Pro Plan that cost $20 per month. Our network at the time consisted of "four and a half" data centers: Chicago, Illinois; Ashburn, Virginia; San Jose, California; Amsterdam, Netherlands; and Tokyo, Japan. The routing to Tokyo was so flaky that we'd turn it off for half the day to not mess up routing around the rest of the world. The biggest difference for the first couple years between our Free and Pro Plans was that only the latter included HTTPS support.

Slide from the Cloudflare Launch Presentation at TechCrunch Disrupt, September 27, 2010‌‌

In June 2012, we introduced our Business Plan for $200 per month and our Enterprise Plan which was customized for our largest customers. By then we'd not only gotten Tokyo to work reliably but added 18 more data centers around the world for a total of 23. Our Business plan added DDoS mitigation as the primary benefit, something prior to then we'd been terrified to offer.

Cloudflare’s Network as of June 16, 2012, courtesy of The Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine‌‌

Fast-forward to today and a lot has changed. We're up to presence in more than 275 cities in more than 100 countries worldwide. We included HTTPS support in our Free Plan with the launch of Universal SSL in September 2014. We included unlimited DDoS mitigation in our Free Plan with the launch of Unmetered DDoS Mitigation in September 2017. Today, we stop attacks for Free Plan customers on a daily basis that are more than 10-times as big as what was headline news back in 2013.

Our strategy has always been to roll features out, limit them at first to higher tiers of paying customers, but, over time, roll them down through our plans and eventually to even our Free Plan customers. We believe everyone should be fast, reliable, and secure online regardless of their budget. And we believe our continued success should be primarily driven by new innovation, not by milking old features for revenue.

And we've delivered on that promise, accelerating our roll-out of new features across our platform and bundling them into our existing plans without increasing prices. What you get for our Free, Pro, and Business Plans today is orders of magnitude more valuable across every dimension — performance, reliability, and security — than those plans were when they launched.

And yet we know we are our customers’ infrastructure. You rely on us. And therefore we have been very reluctant to ever raise prices just to take price and capture more revenue.

Early on, we only charged monthly because we were an unproven service we knew customers were taking a risk on. Today, that's no longer the case. The majority of our customers have been using us for years and, from our conversations with them, plan to continue using us for the foreseeable future. In fact, one of the top requests we receive is from customers who want to pay once per year rather than getting billed every month.

While I'm proud of our pace of innovation, one of the challenges we have is managing the cash flow to fund those investments as quickly as we'd like. We invest up front in building out our network or developing a new feature, but then only get paid monthly by our customers. That, inherently, is a governor on our pace of innovation. We can invest even faster — hire more engineers, deploy more servers — if those customers who know they're going to use us for the next year pay for us up front. We have no shortage of things we know customers want us to build, so by collecting revenue earlier we know we can unlock even faster innovation.

In other words, we are making this change hoping most of you won't pay us anything more than you did before. Instead, our hope is that most of you will adopt our annual plans — you’ll get to lock in the existing pricing, and you’ll help us further accelerate our network growth and pace of innovation.

Finally, I wanted to mention that something isn't changing: our Free Plan. It will still be free. It will still have all the features it has today. And we're still committed to, over time, rolling many more features that are only available in paid plans today down to the Free Plan over time. Our mission is to help build a better Internet. We want to win by being the most innovative company in the world. And that means making our services available to as many people as possible, even those who can't afford to pay us right now.

But, for those of you who can pay: thank you. You've funded our innovation to date. And I hope you'll opt to switch to our annual billing, so we can further accelerate our network expansion and pace of innovation.

Cloudflare launched on September 27, 2010. This week we'll celebrate our 12th birthday. As has become our tradition, we'll be announcing a series of products that we think of as our gifts back to the Internet. In previous years, these have included products and initiatives like Universal SSL, Cloudflare Workers, our Zero Markup Registrar, the Bandwidth Alliance, and R2 — our zero egress fee object store — which went GA last week.

We're really excited for what we'll be announcing this year and hope to surprise and delight all of you over the course of the week with the products and features we believe live up to our mission of helping build a better Internet.

While this will be our 12th Birthday Week of product announcements, for the last two years, as the cofounders of the company, we've also taken this time as an opportunity to write a letter publicly reflecting on the previous year and what's on our minds as we go into the year ahead.

Since our last birthday, it's been a tale of two halves of a very different year. At the end of 2021 and into the first two months of 2022, COVID infection rates were falling globally, effective vaccines were getting rolled out, and the world seemed to be returning to a sense of pre-pandemic normalcy.

Internally, we were starting to meet again in person with colleagues and customers. We'd weathered an unprecedented increase in traffic across our network caused by the pandemic and, with a few bumps along the way, used the challenges we'd faced through that time to rebuild our architecture to be more stable and reliable for the long term. We both felt optimistic for the future.

Then, on February 24, Russia invaded Ukraine. While we were fortunate to not have team members working from Russia, Ukraine, or Belarus, we have many employees with families in the region and six offices within a train ride of the front lines. We watched in real time as Internet traffic patterns across Ukraine shifted, a disturbing reflection of what was happening on the ground as cities were bombed and families fled.

At the same time, Russia ratcheted up their efforts to censor their country's Internet of all non-Russia media. While we had seen some Internet restrictions in Russia over the years, historically Russian citizens were generally able to freely access nearly any resources online. The dramatically increased censorship marked an extreme change in policy and the first time a country of any scale had tried to go from a generally open Internet to one that was fully censored.

But, even as the war continues to rage, there is reason for optimism. In spite of a significant increase in censorship inside Russia, physical links to the rest of the world being cut in Ukraine, cyber attacks targeting Ukrainian infrastructure, and Russian forces actively rerouting BGP in invaded regions, by and large the Internet has continued to flow. As John Gilmore once famously said: "The Internet sees censorship as damage and routes around it."

The private sector and governments around the world came together to help support Ukraine and render Russian cyberattacks largely moot. Our team provided our services for free to government, financial services, media, and civil society organizations that came under cyber attack, ensuring they stayed online. As the physical Internet links were severed in the country, our network teams worked to route traffic through every possible path to ensure not only could news from outside Ukraine get in but, equally importantly, pictures and news of the war could get out.

Those pictures and news of what is happening inside Ukraine continue to galvanize support. The Ukrainian government continues to function in spite of withering cyber attacks. Voices inside Russia pushing back against the regime are increasingly being heard. And ordinary Russian citizens have increasingly turned to services like Cloudflare's 1.1.1.1 App to see uncensored news, in record numbers.

Our efforts to keep the Internet on in Russia led the Putin regime to officially sanction one of us (Matthew) — a sign we took that we were making a positive impact. Today we estimate approximately 5% of all households in the country are continuing to access the uncensored Internet using our 1.1.1.1 App, and that number continues to grow.

2022 was not the first year in which the Internet became a battleground, but to us, it does feel like a turning point. In the last twelve months, we've seen more countries shut down Internet access than in any previous year. Sometimes this is just a misguided and ineffectual effort to keep students from cheating on national exams. Unfortunately, increasingly, it's about repressive regimes attempting to assert control.

As we write this, the Iranian government is attempting to silence protests in the country through broad Internet censorship. While some may suggest this is business as usual, in fact it is not. The Internet and the broad set of news and opinions it brings have generally been available in places like Iran and Russia, and we shouldn't accept that full censorship in them is the de facto status quo.

And these efforts to reign in the Internet are unfortunately not limited to Iran and Russia. Even in the liberal, democratic corners of Western Europe, incidents in which court ordered blocking at the infrastructure layer resulting in massive overblocking spiked dramatically over the last year. Those cases will set a dangerous precedent that a single court in a single country can block access to wide swaths of the Internet.

While it may seem ok to Austrians for an Austrian court to enforce Austrian values for an issue within Austria, if any country's courts can block content at the core Internet infrastructure level even when it results in the blocking of unrelated sites then it will have a global impact. And, inherently, it will open the door for Afghanistan, Albania, Algeria, Andorra, Angola, Antigua, Argentina, Armenia, Australia, and Azerbaijan to do the same. And that's just the countries that start with the letter A. If these precedents are upheld then the Internet risks falling to the lowest common denominator of what's globally acceptable.

The magic of the early Internet was that it was permissionless. Cloudflare was founded to counter an old and very different threat to that magic than we face today. Early in Cloudflare's history, we used to get asked who we were competing against. We have never thought the answer was Akamai or EdgeCast. While, from a business perspective, we always thought of our business as replacing the vast catalog of Cisco's hardware boxes with scalable services, that transition seemed inevitable. Instead, the existential competitor we faced was a threat to the permissionless Internet itself: Facebook.

If you find your eyebrow raised as you read that, know you're not alone. It was the universal reaction we’d get whenever we said that back in 2010, and it remains the universal reaction we get when we say it today. But it has always rung true. In 2010, when Cloudflare launched, it was getting so difficult to be online — between spam, hackers, DDoS, reliability, and performance issues — that many people, organizations, and businesses gave up on the web and sought a safe space in Facebook's walled garden.

If the challenges of being online weren't solved in some other way, there was real risk that Facebook would, effectively, become the Internet. The magic of the Internet was that anyone with an idea could put it online and, if it resonated, thrive without having to pass through a gatekeeper. It seemed wrong to us that if those trends continued you'd have to effectively get Facebook's permission just be online. Preserving the permissionless Internet was a big part of what motivated us to start Cloudflare.

So we set out to help solve the problems of cyberattacks, outages, and other performance challenges making sure that the Internet we believed in could continue to thrive. We built a global network able to mitigate the largest DDoS attacks easily, and to make anything connected to the Internet faster, more secure, and more reliable. We created tools to make it easy for developers to build and maintain new platforms, with the ability to deploy serverless code in an instant across the globe. We developed new ways for our customers to protect their internal systems from attack with Zero Trust services. And we made it all as widely available as possible, constantly striving to provide accessible tools not only to the Fortune 1000 but also to the small businesses, nonprofits, and developers with ideas about how to build something new, creative, and good for the world.

It's not dissimilar to the story of another disruptive tech company that began a few years before we did. Shopify has been a long time Cloudflare customer using a number of our services, including our Workers developer platform. Their unofficial rallying cry of "arming the rebels" has always resonated with us.

In many ways, Shopify is to Amazon.com as Cloudflare is to Facebook. Both of the former providing the key infrastructure you need to innovate and then getting out of your way, both of the latter building a walled garden from which they can ultimately extract maximum rents.

Shopify framing their customers as the rebels taking on the Empire of Amazon is, of course, a reference to Star Wars and so it may not be surprising that we often talk internally about the Star Wars movies as a metaphor for the history of the Internet: past, present, and maybe future.

The first movie, Episode IV, was titled "A New Hope." The plot of that movie feels a lot like how the world experienced the Internet for the 40 years prior to 2016. There was this magical thing called the Force, and it was controlled by these incredible people called Jedi. Except instead of the Force it was the Internet and instead of Jedi it was programmers and network engineers.

It's easy to forget that it's the stuff of not-too-long-ago science fiction that you could have a device in your pocket that could access the sum of all human knowledge. And yet, there are now more smartphones in active use than humans on Earth. Neither of us feel all that old, yet we both grew up in a time when if you had an opinion and wanted to get it out to a broad audience you had to write it up, send it in as a letter to the editor, and hope that it would get published.

Today in the world of Twitter and TikTok that is almost unimaginably quaint. The Internet blew that all up, just as Luke blew up the Death Star, and it's hard to overstate how much that disrupted every traditional source of power and control.

But after Episode IV came Episode V: “The Empire Strikes Back.” And make no mistake, the traditional centers of control are working hard to find ways to control the Internet. While we think the shift came somewhere around 2016, it feels like in 2022 the Empire has discovered the rebel base on Hoth and the AT-ATs are closing in.

Episode V is a pretty dark movie. Spoiler alert for the small percentage of you who may not have seen it, but the hero realizes his mortal enemy is his father, loses his hand, his rogue friend is encased in carbonite, and the girl he likes sold into slug slavery shortly after she declares her love for not him but the about-to-be-carbonite-encased friend. But it's also the best movie because the stakes are so high.

The stakes are high for the Internet too, and we believe it's important for us to engage on the hard technology and policy issues. The next several years will be challenging as we rebuild the legacy protocols of the Internet to be more private and secure by design, so they can accommodate what the Internet has become, and wrestle with hard policy issues around respecting local laws and norms on a network that is inherently global. The team at Cloudflare comes to work every day appreciating the challenges and importance of what we need to help do to live up to our mission.

Our mission is to help build a better Internet, and we are proud that more than 20% of the web and 30% of the Fortune 1,000 relies on Cloudflare to be fast, reliable, secure, efficient, and private for whatever they are doing online. Throughout the year we have Innovation Weeks usually dedicated to new products to sell to our customers. But, during our Birthday Week, we give back with products and initiatives that aren’t designed to generate revenue, but instead we provide them because they improve the fundamentals of how the Internet works.

And so this year we'll be launching new services and partnerships to make the best security practices more affordable and bring them more easily to an increasingly mobile world. We're helping developers access more resources they need to deliver the next generation of applications. And we're launching privacy-preserving alternatives to widely used services because we believe a better Internet is a more private Internet.

We're not ready to declare that it's time for the Ewoks to start dancing, but we are proud of our continued innovation and the thoughtfulness of our team as we navigate these challenging times. Although the global economy continues to provide uncertain headwinds as we head into the new year, we are confident we have the plan and the team that will make us successful.

Thank you to our team, our customers, and our investors. Happy 12th birthday to Cloudflare. And, as always: we're just getting started.

This week we celebrate Cloudflare's birthday. We launched the company 11 years ago tomorrow: September 27, 2010. It has been our tradition, since our first birthday, to use this week to launch innovative new products that we think of as our gift back to the Internet.

Since going public, it's also been an opportunity for us to update our Annual Founders' Letter and share what's on our mind. Recently we've been thinking about three things: team, the Internet, and innovation.

When anyone asks us the key to Cloudflare's success, we always say the same thing: the team we've been able to attract to help us achieve our mission of helping build a better Internet. In the last year we've had more than 250,000 people apply to work for us and extended offers to less than one half of one percent of them. We continue to attract great people.

It's incredible to realize that more than half of Cloudflare's team today started since March 13, 2020, when we closed all our physical offices due to the pandemic. In the last several months, as we've started to see a light at the end of the COVID tunnel, we've been hosting what we called Summer Socials with our team. Getting together outside, often over a picnic lunch, it's been fun to meet face-to-face people we'd only video conferenced with before. And even more fun to watch people from across the team get to know each other outside the confines of a Brady Bunch-like on-screen box.

As a company that was very much a work-from-office culture before the pandemic, we were terrified of what would happen to our culture when we switched to fully remote work. Eighteen months into this forced experiment on a new way of working we're happy to report: it's working. Really well.

It turns out what we all suspected is in fact true. Culture has little to do with fun offices, plentiful snacks, or adjustable desks. Instead, for us, it starts with hiring people who are relentlessly curious and, at the same time, empathetic. Curious people want to learn. Empathetic people love to teach. And if you put a group of them together, whether in a swanky office or on Zoom, great things will happen.

As we come out the other side of COVID, we have an opportunity to help build a better way to work. It would be naive to insist that we go back to the way we did things before. We've been more productive, and on average our team has been happier in their jobs, than any time in the company's history. At the same time, we know there can be considerable value in coming together in person to solve hard problems, brainstorm about the future, and build relationships that make the company stronger.

We don't have all the answers on what the future of work looks like, but we've begun to formulate a place to start our experiments as people come back. We hope we can use the times we get together as ways to better collaborate and learn. But, at the same time, give our team the flexibility to work how and wherever they are the most productive.

Cloudflare's mission is to help build a better Internet. We always capitalize the I in Internet, in spite of what the AP style guide has said since 2016, because it's a proper noun, we believe there is and only should be one, and we have an enduring respect for what a miracle it is that it exists.

Right around the same time that the AP started to say that you needn't capitalize the I in Internet anymore, something seemed to change. The world shifted from seeing the Internet and what it enabled as an irreproachable good to a source of great danger.

We've watched the same thing. Since 2016 it's often felt like a connection to the Internet only brings cyberattacks, toxic social media, threats to democracy, increasing polarization, and a declining disdainful discourse.

We have real challenges ahead as some of the technologies that ride on top of the Internet have broken down traditional gatekeepers without sufficient concern for addressing the harms they previously protected against. But, at the same time, the Internet itself remains a miracle.

A mere 11 years before Cloudflare's founding, long distance phone calls still cost a fortune, sharing a photograph with someone in another country took weeks, and the idea that you could access the sum total of human knowledge from a device in your pocket was beyond even the fantasies of science fiction.

The last 18 months of the pandemic have reaffirmed our faith in the miracle that is the Internet. Imagine just how much worse it would have been had the pandemic happened just 11 years ago, let alone 22. The Internet allowed many of us to continue to work, connect with our loved ones, exercise our creativity, and stay connected to the world.

We're proud of what we've done to live up to our mission and help build a better Internet during this time. And, as we come out the other side, we will continue to engage with policy makers to address the new harms an interconnected world has brought while preserving the miracle that is the Internet itself.

The Internet may seem static, but it is not. 11 years ago, watching a video online was an exercise in frustration. Today, it seems almost automatic that you can push play on your TV and access nearly any movie ever made instantly. That's possible because the Internet isn't static; it gets better through innovation.

At Cloudflare, we're optimized to catalyze exactly that innovation. It starts with our mission: to help build a better Internet. The word "help" is important, because we know we can't do it alone. So, wherever we can, we work with others across the Internet ecosystem to push it forward and make it better.

Sometimes people outside the company are surprised by the products we build. In fact, predicting our roadmap is pretty easy. We look at all the steps that are required to load a web page, send an email, stream a video, login to a workstation, or anything else you do online and ask: can we make that more secure, more reliable, or faster?

What's exciting is that the pace at which the Internet is getting better is accelerating. And, in turn, the pace at which we are able to launch innovative new products is accelerating along with it. As the Internet grows and acquires more capabilities, we believe we will continue to grow with it. An investment in Cloudflare is, fundamentally, we feel an investment in the Internet itself.

And so, this week, we have an incredible series of announcements that are designed to help build a better Internet. We're entering a new area to close one of the last network security risks that we haven't historically protected our customers from, driving down costs of core cloud services, pushing the boundary of our network to our customers' doorsteps, and investing in new technologies that may someday disrupt the web as we know it today.

Thank you to our team, our customers, and our investors. Happy 11th birthday to Cloudflare. And, even as we pick up steam, we continue to believe: we're just getting started.

During Impact Week, we've shared how Cloudflare is providing tools for our customers to minimize their environmental impact as well as what we, as a company, are doing to help society at large. But some critical stakeholders we haven’t talked much about yet are Cloudflare's more than 2,000 employees: who build our services, support and educate our customers, keep our finances in order, work through difficult policy issues, and empower us to accomplish everything we have.

Over the last year and a half, we've all challenged a lot of the assumptions about what it means to "work." Prior to the start of the pandemic, Cloudflare was very much a work-from-office culture. And so when, on March 13, 2020, we closed all our offices and asked everyone to work from home, the two of us were extremely nervous.

And then something unexpected happened: a lot of things got better.

As a company, productivity increased — when measured by our success selling our products, our pace of shipping new products, and even things like the time it takes for our finance team to close our books.

Other day-to-day things got better, too. We noticed a marked increase in participation in meetings by women, team members from whom English wasn't their first language, junior team members, and other traditionally underrepresented groups. It turns out, putting everyone in a Brady-bunch like box on a screen smooths out some of the other social cues that, when in-person, make some people less comfortable, willing, or able to fully participate.

It's not unreasonable to speculate that the increase in productivity was driven, in no small part, by the increase in overall participation by people who previously felt reluctant to do so. And this further aligned with job surveys that we conducted over the last year and a half which showed that while the things people wanted us to improve remained the same, overall satisfaction with jobs increased.

We also noticed that the diversity of the candidates that were applying to work for us increased as we allowed people to work remotely. We were now an option for people who did not live in, or could not move to, the cities we had offices in. At Cloudflare, we've always believed in having a diverse team. Not to look good in a government report, but because it's the right business strategy: more diverse teams win.

We all have different perspectives formed by our experiences that inherently give us insights and blind spots. If everyone on a team has the same insights and blind spots then there will be less unique and creative solutions proposed to whatever problems we face. Just as it’s important to have genetic diversity in a species, having diversity on every dimension in hiring makes us a stronger, more creative company. Prioritizing a diverse team is the right strategy if you're optimizing for innovation, like we are at Cloudflare.

But not everything got better when we switched to remote; some things definitely got worse. We're social creatures. We thrive through human interaction that is still difficult to replicate virtually. Even with improvements in video conferencing, online interactions still mute some of the social cues and make misunderstanding more likely. The osmosis for our team of learning by watching others is harder, especially for team members early in their career. And, unfortunately, for some the office is a refuge from difficult situations at home and so not having it as a place to get away can amplify those challenges.

So we've been thinking a lot about what the future of work looks like at Cloudflare and wanted to share publicly what we've been talking about for some time internally. Here are some things we think we know.

First, we don't know what the long term future of work will be like and so we've been hesitant to lay down broad proclamations. Instead, we expect that as we get past the pandemic and are able to work in-person safely again, we will do what Cloudflare has always done: run a number of experiments ourselves, watch what our peers are doing, and figure out what works for us. The one thing we feel pretty sure of is that wherever we start the experiment is highly unlikely to be exactly the place where we end up. The future of work won't be set in stone sometime in the coming months, but evolve over the coming years.

Second, no matter what, the future of work will be more flexible. There's no way we are putting the genie of remote work back in the bottle. Why would we want to if we've learned that we've been more productive and more satisfied with their jobs while we've been remote? Flexibility is the number one requested work benefit, and one of the silver linings of the pandemic for us has been that we ran a forced experiment that proved we could make it work.

Third, we are incredibly reluctant to impose arbitrary rules. Requiring team members to come in every Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday begs the question: why those days? Saying you need to come in if you're below a certain seniority level also seems weirdly arbitrary. Instead of rules, we're much more likely to start with general standards outlining what success as a member of the team at Cloudflare looks like and giving guidelines. We may need rules at some point, but we want to develop those rules over time based on what we learn.

Fourth, just opening offices and hoping for the best doesn't work. What we've seen ourselves, and confirmed with others, is that what makes working from an office great is getting to work side-by-side with your colleagues. But if Alyssa comes in on Monday, and Blake comes in on Tuesday, and Carlos comes in on Wednesday, and Deeksha comes in on Thursday, and Ellen comes in on Friday, and they all hoped that they would get to connect, then none of them has a good experience and none of them come in the following week. If in-person work is going to work, there needs to be some deliberate structure and planning.

Fifth, we believe more in carrots than sticks. We'd rather we create an environment where people want to come in than where they have to come in. Based on our internal surveys, about 10% of our team wants to come in every day. We want to make the environment such that 100% of our team wants to come in at least some days.

Sixth, a more flexible way of working will require a more flexible physical space. The base "lego brick" we used to design all our offices pre-pandemic was the 6-person conference room. And, while none of our offices started this way, they all evolved into a sea of white, adjustable desks in neat rows as we found spots for our growing team. That already feels anachronistic. We think we need to redesign spaces to accommodate teams coming together to collaborate as well as individuals looking for a quiet spot for heads-down work.

Seventh, mixed meetings suck. When some people are in-person and some people are virtual the experience is bad for everyone. Part of why we think the last year and a half has worked is because everyone is in the same boat. We believe part of the reason why hybrid work environments have traditionally not worked is because they, left to their own devices, will tend to devolve to an experience that's bad for everyone. The future of flexible work needs to acknowledge that most hybrid work experiments in the past haven’t worked.

Eighth, we're a very global company. We have team members in countries around the world and need to operate our business around the clock. One of the benefits of being fully remote over the last year and a half is that it made all our offices feel like they were on equal footing. That's something we believe is important for us to maintain.

So what's our plan? Again, we don't pretend to have all the answers. Instead, we expect that we'll start somewhere and experiment. So we're starting by being more flexible about where we hire people. We still believe that people will tend to cluster in hubs around cities where we have physical offices, but we are now open to hiring for nearly all of our roles in any location where we have a legal entity setup that allows us to hire.

We are tearing apart our offices in San Francisco and London to remake them into flexible work spaces. We're designing them to allow for teams of 10, 20, or 30 employees to get together and collaborate. We're also creating "Zoom villages" with one-person spaces and high quality AV equipment to let people jump on conference calls.

One of the few rules that we plan on starting with is that in meetings if any person is remote then everyone in the meeting is remote. We know that will create some awkward situations where some of our team will literally be sitting next to each other at desks talking on a video conference call. But we believe this is a rule worth having, in spite of our hesitation to impose strict rules, to help keep the playing field level for all our colleagues, wherever they're working.

We're going to rethink the purpose of the offices as spaces where teams can come together to collaborate. Internally, we're calling these "on-site off-sites" — though everyone agrees we need a better name. The idea being that teams can call an in-person meeting and reserve space in any of our offices to come together. We expect different teams will set different cadences of these meetings, but expect most people to have at least some time in an office at least once a quarter.

We're planning for what we've termed a “Czar of Serendipity” who will coordinate cross-group lunches and other activities to help facilitate teams who may not work directly together to have the opportunity if they want to meet colleagues they may not otherwise know. They'll also help arrange in-person speakers and other activities aligned with whatever teams or groups are physically in the office each week.

And we're hunting for carrots to encourage our team, and especially members who are earlier in their career, to come in. One we're working on is what we're calling Orange Card. We hope to turn every team member's ID into a charge card. The card will only activate after someone badges in for the day and will only work to purchase food at restaurants that are within a 10-minute walk from the office with pre-tax dollars.

It's in Cloudflare's interest to encourage people to come in physically to work. Across the industry, however, we think jobs that require in-person work will look increasingly anachronistic. We also believe that, rather than operating private cafeterias inside our own spaces, it's important for us to support local businesses near our offices — especially as so many of them were hit hard during COVID. If with Orange Card we can do this and find a way to let employees pay for lunches when they’re in the office at an effective discount, then it will check both boxes: giving employees a reason to come in and also supporting the local community.

We don’t know how many of these things will work, but it’s a sense of the experiments we intend to run as we try and find the future of work that works for our team.

In many ways we were fortunate that Cloudflare's product could be of specific help during an incredibly difficult time for the world. The superheros of the last year and a half have been the medical professionals and scientists who have taken care of the sick and looked for cures for this disease. But the Internet has been the faithful sidekick that has helped many continue to work, stay connected with loved ones, and keep ourselves entertained through this trying time. As one of the defenders of the Internet, our work at Cloudflare has been incredibly rewarding. We hope we can create a future of work that remains incredibly rewarding even long past the pandemic.

The thoughts above are just a starting place. We expect that we're going to learn a lot not only from our own experiments, but also from what we learn works (and doesn't work) at peer companies. We would have never tried this experiment in remote work but for the pandemic. Now, having realized that we can continue to execute in a more flexible work environment, we don't plan to forget the lessons we learned. We're hopeful that we, along with our peer companies, will continue to run experiments and, over time, develop a new future of work that is more flexible, more inclusive, and more productive.

PS - We're hiring.

One theme we've prioritized this year at Cloudflare is how we can “level up” — level up service to our customers, level up the growth of our network, level up speed and creativity as we innovate.

In addition to our products and business, “leveling up” should also apply to the way Cloudflare gives back. Since our founding, giving back has been part of Cloudflare’s DNA, whether it’s through free services like Unmetered DDoS Mitigation or Universal SSL, giving gifts to the Internet every year during Birthday Week, or through free programs like Project Galileo that helps protect at-risk public interest organizations all over the world: for example, human rights activists and journalists. As the capabilities of our network continue to grow, we know there is more we can do. As we started to plan our first Impact Week, it seemed like the right time to figure out how we can level up how we give back to our communities.

To help us get there, I am excited to announce that Cloudflare is joining Pledge 1%. We're joining the more than 12,000 companies in 100 countries that are committed to making a tangible, positive impact in their communities. As part of Cloudflare's pledge to give 1%, we're committing to donate 1% of our products and 1% of our time to give back to our local communities as well as all the communities we support online around the world.

Pledge 1% launched in 2014 with a mission to create a new normal where giving back is integrated into the foundation of companies at all stages of development, from startups to the Fortune 500. As part of the commitment, companies are encouraged to commit to donating to charitable causes one percent of any combination of their products, profits, time or equity.

Part of Cloudflare's commitment to Pledge 1% will be to grow and expand our donated services programs. Donating free products and services is a part of Cloudflare's story. We started our company with the basic idea that high-end networking services like security, content delivery, and reliability features should be available for everyone.

In 2014 we launched Project Galileo with the simple idea that we could offer services to journalists and human rights activities around the world for free. Today, Cloudflare protects over 1,500 organizations in 111 countries, and has donated more than $8 million worth of services through that program alone. After the 2016 US election, we launched the Athenian Project to provide state and local governments with our highest level security and reliability services for free, to ensure voters would be able to access election and voter registration information. We now have 292 government entities across 30 states participating in the program, and just yesterday, we announced that the Athenian Project is now available globally.

This week, we also announced our newest program: Project Pangea. Pangea will help community networks for  underserved populations, including those in rural and developing locations, connect to the Internet for free.

We think we are only scratching the surface of how we can leverage one of the world's fastest, most secure, most reliable networks to help underserved communities access and stay safe online. We're excited to partner with Pledge 1% and all the great companies that are participating in the movement to help move us forward.

Maybe the most exciting part about Cloudflare joining Pledge 1% is our new commitment to give one percent of our team's time. To meet that goal, Cloudflare is now offering all employees three days additional annual leave to volunteer in their communities.

Volunteering is an important part of our culture at Cloudflare. Prior to COVID, our team could dedicate one week every year to local volunteer efforts, which we called Cloudflare Cares. Coordinated across many of our large office locations, we would dedicate each day for a full week volunteering at employee-nominated, local non-profit organizations. Our participation pivoted to virtual during COVID, and it's been incredible to see the impact one can make in their communities virtually, as well as in person. However, like a lot of folks,  we are excited to return to in-person as soon as we are able to. We are looking forward to leveraging our 1% initiative to take Cloudflare Cares to a higher level of community engagement, around all of our global offices.

Although 1% of time is a significant investment — we expect this to net out at somewhere in the order of 70,000 hours of Cloudflarian time dedicated to this initiative next year — we think it has the potential to bring our teams closer together, to bring our offices closer to their communities, and attract active and engaged people to come join our team. It's a big part of our mission to help build a better Internet.

We're incredibly proud to be joining Pledge 1%. Their goals are consistent with Cloudflare’s goals, and their methods will help us live up to those values consistently and intentionally. We’ve always been excited to find ways to build products that give back to the world. It is also great to find ways for our team building those products to give back to their communities.

We're just getting started.

Today Cloudflare announced that Toronto will be home to Cloudflare’s first Canadian office and team. While I currently live in San Francisco, I was born and raised in Saskatchewan. As a proud Canadian, today feels like a homecoming. Canada has always been an important part of our history and customer base, and I am thrilled to see Cloudflare make a further commitment of expanding officially in the country and opening an office in Toronto. We are hiring a team locally to help our current customers and future customers, and to support even more great Canadian organizations. I wanted to share more about how Cloudflare works with Canadian businesses, what today’s announcement means, and some personal reflections.

Cloudflare helps ensure anything connected to the Internet is fast, safe, and reliable. We do this by running a distributed global cloud platform that delivers a broad range of network services to businesses of all sizes—making them more secure, enhancing the performance of anything connected online, and eliminating costs and complexity. We help approximately 25M Internet properties around the world—whether you’re a Canadian entrepreneur trying to spin up your next idea, a healthcare company trying to speed up vaccine distribution, a Global 2000 company, or a non-profit.

Today we work with thousands of customers in Canada including Canadian entrepreneurs, universities, non-profits, large enterprises, as well as small businesses. All of those services need to be fast online, protected from cyber attacks, reliable, and available around the world. Cloudflare helps make that happen—and we’re really good at it. Each day we have blocked an average of 70 billion cyber attacks on behalf of our customers—more than 3.2 billion of those attacks, that we have seen everyday, originate in Canada—and that number has increased by 26% from the end of 2020. We have also seen online usage increasing as well—Internet traffic in Canada is up about 60% compared to one year ago when the world was first shifting to a virtual lifestyle. Canadians are spending a lot more time online in 2021, compared to 2020.

I’m especially proud of how we’ve offered our technology to organizations that may not have the resources to keep up with high traffic and protection from cyberattacks like BullyingCanada, Canada's largest anti-bullying charity serving Canadian youth. Helping keep their website reliable and secure for children and families seeking support, especially when they need it most. It’s also fulfilling to know that we help power COVID-19 vaccine distributors, like Verto Health in Canada and Jane who are helping with the vaccine distribution in British Columbia. We help keep these registration sites accessible, withstand scheduling demands, and efficiently queue and facilitate the distribution of the COVID-19 vaccine.

It turns out whether you are a developer working on a hobby project or a large Canadian organization, every business needs to deliver their service more quickly, more securely, and more reliably. That’s exactly why we started Cloudflare.

There’s no question that the world has relied on the Internet more than ever before this past year—and that isn’t going away. The Internet has reinvented the way we live and survive. We’ve relied on the Internet to access public information, visit the doctor, get our work done, stay in-touch with friends and loved ones, educate our children, order groceries, and so many other things.

Canada has done a great job at fostering digital citizenship, and is continuing to take this ahead of the curve as one of the most Internet connected countries in the world (#7!). Also, the depth and quality of Canada’s tech talent pool is undeniable, with more than 2.8 million STEM graduates and the world’s highest educated workforce.

There's a strong growing technology ecosystem and entrepreneurship in Canada. This isn’t just a moment, it’s a movement. And it’s gaining steam. Since 2013, Toronto has added more tech jobs than any other place in North America, including Silicon Valley. There are numerous communities helping propel this. As a Charter Member of The C100 it’s great to see how this community of Canadians in tech are supporting, inspiring, and connecting with Canadian entrepreneurs across the globe. There are plenty of other amazing communities and resources including Next 36, Co.Labs, Elevate and events like Collision Conference bringing together the vast technology industry—I’ll be speaking about Canadian entrepreneurship tomorrow alongside Ariel Garten.

Canada is also a strong research hub that’s progressing global standards. We’ve worked with a number of research teams and academic communities, such as with the University of Waterloo, to evolve global cybersecurity, cryptography, and privacy. Now having our team on the ground presents an even stronger opportunity to deepen this work.

I grew up in Prince Albert, Saskatchewan, and my journey from the North to Silicon Valley included stops in Montreal and Toronto, before I headed to Boston for business school and, eventually California.

Saskatchewan is all about community and hard work, which gave me the foundation to be an entrepreneur and really help build what Cloudflare is today.

Toronto is a special place for me because it was where I fell in love with startups. I worked for an early-stage startup, and that’s where I learned about the power of what a small group of motivated people can accomplish together. It’s also where I got my first experience working in technology. I soon saw how pragmatic and actionable it was working in technology, and I was instantly drawn to how it could make an impact on the world.

I went to Harvard Business School to pursue my MBA. It was there that I met a super smart serial entrepreneur Matthew Prince. We were classmates and we started to work on Cloudflare together. We eventually moved to San Francisco to join our third co-founder, Lee Holloway and to grow Cloudflare.

Fast forward to almost 11 years later, I’m excited for Cloudflare to expand our team to Canada. We are here to help build a better Internet—for Canadian organizations and their online users.

I’m thrilled that we are doubling down on hiring local talent to further support local customers and partner with more businesses in the region. As new neighbors in the region, don’t hesitate to reach out if we can help:

• Universities/Research: For research industry professionals and Universities interested in working with us, or if you want to learn more about Cloudflare’s approach to research, check out research.cloudflare.com or connect with the team: ask-research@cloudflare.com

• Project Galileo: We proudly secure public interest groups with our highest level of cybersecurity, at no cost, through Cloudflare’s Project Galileo. If you are an organization working in the arts, human rights, civil society, journalism, or democracy, you can apply for Project Galileo to get this protection, free of charge.

• Project Fair Shot: Around the world, governments, hospitals, and pharmacies are struggling to distribute the COVID-19 vaccine. We want to help and have created a feature for vaccine registration sites to keep up with demand and use digital queues to safely scale their efforts, at no cost. If you are an organization facilitating the distribution of the vaccine, reach out and we’ll work with you quickly.

• Businesses: If your business needs Internet security, performance, and reliability services, our team is ready to help. We have affordable plans for startups, non-profits, and small businesses at 20 or 200 dollars/month where you can get started now, or if you are a larger enterprise that wants to talk to our customer team, in Canada, contact us.

• Careers: Finally, if you are interested in joining an ambitious mission to help build a better Internet, get in-touch with our team and checkout Cloudflare careers: Cloudflare Canada Careers.

Cloudflare launched on September 27, 2010 — 10 years ago today. Stopping to look back over the last 10 years is challenging in some ways because so much of who we are has changed radically. A decade ago when we launched we had a few thousand websites using us, our tiny office was above a nail salon in Palo Alto, our team could be counted on less than two hands, and our data center locations on one hand.

Outside our first office in Palo Alto in 2010. Photo by Ray Rothrock.

As the company grew, it would have been easy to stick with accelerating and protecting developers and small business websites and not see the broader picture. But, as this year has shown with crystal clarity, we all depend on the Internet for many aspects of our lives: for access to public information and services, to getting work done, for staying in touch with friends and loved ones, and, increasingly, for educating our children, ordering groceries, learning the latest dance moves, and so many other things. The Internet underpins much of what we do every day, and Cloudflare’s mission to help build a better Internet seems more and more important every day.

Over time Cloudflare has gone from an idea on a piece of paper to one of the largest networks in the world that powers millions of customers. Because we made our network to be flexible and programmable, what we’ve been able to do with it has expanded over time as well. Today we secure the Internet end-to-end — from companies’ infrastructure to individuals seeking a faster, more secure, more private connection. Our programmable, global network is at the core of everything we have been able to achieve so far.

This is also the approximate one-year anniversary of Cloudflare going public. At the time, we wrote our first founders' letter to the potential investors. We thought it made sense on this day, which we think of as our birthday, to reflect on the last year, as well as the last 10 years, and start a tradition of updating our original founders' letter on September 27th every year.

Ringing the bell to go public on the NYSE on September 13, 2019.

It's been quite a year for our business. Since our IPO, we've seen record expansion of new customers. That growth has come both from expanding our existing customers as well as winning new business from new customers.

The percentage of the Fortune 1,000 that pay for one or more of Cloudflare's services rose from 10% when we went public to more than 16% today. Across the web as a whole, according to W3Techs' data, over the last year Cloudflare has grown from 10.1% of the top 10 million websites using our services to 14.5% using them today. (Amazon CloudFront, in second place based on the number of websites they serve, grew from 0.8% to 0.9% over the same period.)

Every year to celebrate our birthday we've made it a tradition to launch products that surprise the market with new ways to expand how anyone can use our network. We think of them as gifts back to the Internet. Three years ago, for instance, we launched our edge computing platform called Workers. Today, just three years later, hundreds of thousands of developers are using Workers to build applications, many of which we believe would be impossible to build on any other platform.

This year we're once again launching a series of products to extend Cloudflare's capabilities and hopefully surprise and delight the Internet. One that we're especially excited about brings a new data model to Workers, allowing even more sophisticated applications to be built on the platform.

It is impossible to reflect on the last year and not see the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on our business, our customers, our employees, as well our friends, colleagues, and loved ones in the greater community. It's heartening to think that for more than half of Cloudflare’s life as a public company our team has worked remote.

2020 was meant to be an Olympic year, but COVID-19 stopped that, like much else, from happening. Eight years ago, when Cloudflare was just two, the creator of the World Wide Web, Tim Berners-Lee, sent a message from the opening ceremony of the 2012 Olympics. That message read “This is for everyone” and the idea that the Internet is for all of us continues to be a key part of Cloudflare's ethos today.

When we started Cloudflare we wanted to democratize what we thought were technologies only available to the richest and most Internet-focused organizations. We saw an opportunity to make available to everyone — from individual developers to small businesses to large corporations — the sorts of speed, protection, and reliability that, at the time, only the likes of Google, Amazon, and Facebook could afford.

Over 10 years we’ve consistently rolled out the latest technologies, typically ahead of the rest of the industry, to everyone. And in doing so we’ve attracted employees, individuals, developers, customers to our platform. The Internet is for everyone and we’ve shown that a business can be very successful when we aim to serve everyone — large and small.

Something Steve Jobs said back in 1988 still resonates: “If you want to make a revolution, you've got to raise the lowest common denominator in every single machine." Although we aren’t selling machines, we think that’s right: democratizing features matters.

Just look at the scourge of DDoS attacks. Why should DDoS attack mitigation be expensive when it’s a plague on companies large and small? It shouldn’t, and we optimized our business to make it inexpensive for us and passed that on to our customers through Unmetered DDoS Mitigation — another feature we rolled out to celebrate our Birthday Week three years ago.

In 2014, also during Birthday Week, we launched Universal SSL, making encryption — something that had been expensive and difficult — free for all Cloudflare customers. The week we launched it we doubled the size of the encrypted web. Let’s Encrypt followed shortly after and, together, we’ve brought encryption to more than 90% of the web and made the little padlock in your browser something everyone can afford and should expect.

Percent of the web served over HTTPS as reported by Google.

In January of this year, we rolled out Cloudflare for Teams. The product was designed to replace the legacy VPNs and firewalls that were increasingly anachronistic as work moved to the cloud. Little did we know how much COVID-19 would accelerate their obsolescence and make Cloudflare for Teams essential.

Both of us sat on call after call in mid-March with at first small, then increasingly mid-sized, and eventually large and even governmental organizations who reached out to us looking for a way to survive as their teams shifted to working from home and their legacy hardware couldn't keep up. We made the decision to sacrifice short term profits in order to help businesses large and small get through this crisis by making Cloudflare for Teams free through September.

As we said during our Q1 earnings call, the superheros of this crisis are the medical professionals and scientists who are taking care of the sick and looking for a cure to the disease. But the faithful sidekick throughout has been the Internet. And, as one of the guardians of the Internet, we're proud of helping ensure it was fast, secure, and reliable around the world when it was needed most. We are proud of how Cloudflare's products could help the businesses continue to get work done during this unprecedented time by leaning even more on the Internet.

Giving back to the Internet is core to who we are, and we do not shy away from a challenge. And there are many challenges ahead. In a little over a month, the United States will hold elections. After the 2016 elections we, along with the rest of the world, were concerned to see technology intended to bring people together instead be used to subvert the democratic process. We decided we needed to do something to help prevent that from happening again.

Three and a half years ago, we launched the Athenian Project to provide free cybersecurity resources to any local, state, or federal officials helping administer elections in the United States. We couldn't have built Cloudflare into the company it is today without a stable government as a foundational platform. And, when that foundation is challenged, we believe it is our duty to lend our resources to defend it.

Today, we're helping secure election infrastructure in more than half of the states in the United States. And, over these last weeks before the election, our team is working around the clock to help ensure the process is fair and not disrupted by cyber attacks.

More challenges lie ahead and we won’t shy away from them. Well intentioned governments around the world are increasingly seeking to regulate the Internet to protect their citizens. While the aims are noble, the risk is creating a patchwork of laws that only the Internet giants can successfully navigate. We believe it is critical for us to engage in the conversations around these regulations and work to help ensure as operating online becomes more complex, we can continue to make the opportunities of the Internet created for us when we started Cloudflare available to future startups and entrepreneurs.

Over the last 10 years, it's been sad to watch some of the optimism around technology seem to fade. The perception of technology companies shifted from their being able to do no wrong to, today, their being able to do no right. And, as we've watched the industry develop, we've sympathized with that shift. Too many tech companies have abused customer data, ignored rules, violated privacy, and not been good citizens to the communities in which they operate and serve.

But we continue to believe what we started Cloudflare believing 10 years ago: the Internet itself is a force for good worth fighting to defend. We need to keep striving to make the Internet itself better — always on, always fast, always secure, always private, and available to everyone.

It's striking to think how much more disruptive the COVID-19 crisis could have been had it struck in 2010 not 2020. The difference today is a better Internet. We're proud of the role we've played in helping build that better Internet.

And, ten years in, we're just getting started.

September has always been a special month for Cloudflare. Nine years ago — on September 27th — we launched Cloudflare. And, each year since, we’ve celebrated our birthday with a week full of new products and innovations that support our mission of helping to build a better Internet.

Our mission guides everything we do. One of the most intentional words in our mission is ‘helping’. Building an Internet that can meet the world’s needs cannot be done by any one company or individual; rather, it takes a global community — from nonprofit organizations and businesses to governments and individuals — collaborating to deliver new standards, technologies, and innovations. We believe Cloudflare should be an active participant in the community and help where we can and should.

Our customers and partners are an active part of the community. I often say that customers are one of my favorite parts of my job (our team is my other favorite part). Our customers give us feedback all the time about what they'd like to see to make their Internet properties more secure, more performant and more reliable. Our partners bring forward standards to help make the Internet run more smoothly. For Birthday Week this year, you are going to see many of these come to life.

That sense of Community is the spirit of this year’s Birthday Week. Here is a sneak peek of what to expect this week.  

• Monday: As cyberthreats increase, we are going on the offensive. Cybersecurity has often been called an arms race between good people and bad people. To kick off the week, we’re making an announcement that will give our customers the upper hand on one of the most pervasive threats on the Internet today. Already, we block 44 billion cyber threats per day. With Monday’s launch, we’ll give anyone in our community the chance to join us in this fight. If you want to stop bad actors in their tracks, you’ll love tomorrow’s announcement.

• Tuesday: Insights = the big picture on performance. One thing we hear clearly from our customers is that they need better insights into how their products are performing — from their customers’ point of view. And, with Cloudflare’s vast network, we have an opportunity to meet this need because we see every network and every user in the world. We will announce a powerful new tool that will help our customers gather better data, allowing them to then gauge the speed and performance of their Internet properties. Tune into our blog on Tuesday for more.

• Wednesday: The wait is over. Our product and engineering teams have been working round-the-clock to build a new experience that makes the Internet faster and safer for everyone. If I were to say anything more, it would surely give it away so I’ll leave it at that — you’ll just need to tune in to the blog on Wednesday to find out.

• Thursday: Advancing the Internet, one protocol at a time. New protocols are the underpinning of building a modern Internet. But, to do this effectively (or at all), requires a community-based approach. On Thursday, we’re excited to launch a key new protocol with some truly remarkable partners and leaders.

• Friday: Giving developers more agility and independence. We love developers. Since we first launched Cloudflare Workers two years ago, we’ve seen significant adoption and new innovative solutions that our customers are building with our serverless platform. This week we’ll announce a new Workers service that will let developers easily deploy new web pages and content with Workers.

There's a lot that goes into helping build a better Internet — whether it's improving privacy, giving developers the tools and insights they need to better serve their customers, or teaming up with our ecosystem partners to make our new products more accessible for everyone. Community is the special ingredient to making this happen. We can't wait to share what we've been working on.

—  Michelle

PS: If you’re not already subscribing to the blog, sign up now to receive daily updates that will be sent to your inbox each day this week. We’ll also be hosting a Birthday Week webinar on Thursday, October 3rd - register to get a recap of the week’s announcements.

Cloudflare's three co-founders: Michelle Zatlyn, Lee Holloway, and Matthew Prince

To our potential shareholders:

Cloudflare launched on September 27, 2010. Many great startups pivot over time. We have not. We had a plan and have been purposeful in executing it since our earliest days. While we are still in its early innings, that plan remains clear: we are helping to build a better Internet. Understanding the path we’ve taken to date will help you understand how we plan to operate going forward, and to determine whether Cloudflare is the right investment for you.

Cloudflare was formed to take advantage of a paradigm shift: the world was moving from on-premise hardware and software that you buy to services in the cloud that you rent. Paradigm shifts in technology always create significant opportunities, and we built Cloudflare to take advantage of the opportunities that arose as the world shifted to the cloud.

As we watched packaged software turn into SaaS applications, and physical servers migrate to instances in the public cloud, it was clear that it was only a matter of time before the same happened to network appliances. Firewalls, network optimizers, load balancers, and the myriad of other hardware appliances that previously provided security, performance, and reliability would inevitably turn into cloud services.

We built Cloudflare to provide the suite of cloud services we anticipated customers would demand as they looked to replace their on-premise, hardware-based network appliances. That was an audacious goal and it shaped both our business model and our technical architecture in ways that we believe differentiate us and provide us with a significant competitive advantage.

For example, since we were competing with hardware manufacturers, usage-based billing never made sense for our core products. In the on-premise hardware world, when you suffered more cyber attacks you didn’t pay your firewall vendor more, and when you suffered fewer you didn’t pay them less. If we were going to build a firewall-as-a-service — or any other network appliance replacement — we needed predictable, subscription-based pricing that reflected how companies wished they could pay for their hardware.

We also knew that more data gave us an advantage no hardware appliance could match. Like an Internet-wide immune system, we could learn from all the bits of traffic that flowed through our network. We could learn not only about bad actors and how to stop their attacks, but also about good actors and how to optimize their online experiences. Since more data helped us build better products for all our customers, we never wanted to do anything to discourage any potential customer from routing any amount of traffic, large or small, through our network.

This core tenet of serving the entire Internet forced us to obsess over costs. Efficiency is in the DNA of Cloudflare because it had to be. Being entrusted with investors’ capital is a privilege and we make investments in our business always with a mind toward being good stewards of that capital. Moreover, while it was tempting to just pass along costs like bandwidth to our customers, we knew if we were going to provide a compelling value proposition against hardware we needed to be ruthlessly efficient.

To achieve the level of efficiency needed to compete with hardware appliances required us to invent a new type of platform. That platform needed to be built on commodity hardware. It needed to be architected so any server in any city that made up Cloudflare’s network could run every one of our services. It also needed the flexibility to move traffic around to serve our highest paying customers from the most performant locations while serving customers who paid us less, or even nothing at all, from wherever there was excess capacity.

We built Cloudflare’s platform from the ground up with a full understanding of our audacious plan: to literally help build a better Internet. We didn’t run separate networks to provide our different products. We didn’t use expensive, proprietary hardware. We didn’t start with one product and then attempt to Frankenstein on others over time. Our platform was purpose-built to efficiently deliver security, performance, and reliability to customers of every size from day one. And our platform has allowed us a level of efficiency to achieve the gross margins of leading hardware appliance vendors — 77% in the first half of this year — but with the greater predictability of a SaaS business model.

For some it may be challenging to categorize our business because our platform includes an incredibly diverse set of capabilities. We provide security products like firewall and access management, performance products like intelligent routing, and reliability products like vendor-neutral load balancing — all as a service, without customers needing to install hardware or change their code.

We also have functions that play supporting roles to the products we sell. For example, we built one of the fastest, most reliable content delivery networks not because we were targeting the CDN market, but because we knew caching was a necessary function in order to efficiently deliver our core products. We built the world’s fastest authoritative domain name services, not to sell DNS, but to deliver service levels we knew our customers needed.

We provide features like CDN and DNS for free to all of our customers. We will continue to implement this strategy; onboarding more customers onto our platform and capturing value from our highly differentiated products that, once using any part of Cloudflare’s platform, are only a click away.

Potential investors who are new to Cloudflare sometimes ask questions like: “What will you do if CDN bandwidth prices continue to fall?” We remind them we’ve given CDN away for free since Cloudflare launched in 2010, not because we were trying to disrupt the CDN space, but because the much more valuable products we provide our customers need a highly optimized global caching network to perform up to our standards.

But there is another reason for taking the approach that we do. Cloudflare has always put our customers first and prioritized creating much more value than we capture. We work to get customers onto our platform because, once on board, we know we will be able to solve so many of their problems over time. We aim to make the combined value of the products on our platform significantly more than customers can get from any combination of point solutions.

In the past, to deliver Internet security, performance, and reliability not only required an organization to buy rooms full of expensive network appliances but also to hire IT teams to manage them. While there were some companies that could afford this, the cost was prohibitive for many. Instead of serving only those that could have paid the most, we intentionally made the decision to start by focusing on organizations and individual developers that had previously been underserved. We made our products not only affordable, but easy to use.

And we didn’t stop there. We have continued to improve with every bit of traffic we have seen. In doing so, we have moved up market to the point that, today, approximately 10 percent of the Fortune 1,000 are paying Cloudflare customers. We think one of the best ways to measure the value we deliver is our Net Promoter Score of 68 among paying customers, rivaling some of the best consumer brands in the world. Not only are we obsessed with our customers, but our customers are obsessed with us.

One of the characteristics of the world’s greatest SaaS companies is that they typically enter a market in some small way and then use that toehold to expand their relationship and move up market. We learned from the great SaaS companies that came before us. This strategy has resulted in consistent, long-term — rather than explosive — growth. Contrast this with companies that only build a better mousetrap. They initially experience heady growth shifting defined spend from one product to another, but the challenge they then face is existential: what’s their second, third, and fourth act? Cloudflare doesn’t have this problem.

We have already begun authoring our next chapters. For example, Cloudflare Workers — the productized version of the serverless architecture we developed for ourselves — is today adopted by more than 20 percent of our new customers. Cloudflare Workers allows our developer customers to write code in the languages they know — C, C++, JavaScript, Rust, Go — and deploy it to the edge of our network, allowing anyone to create new applications with security, performance, and reliability previously reserved to the Internet giants. Cloudflare Workers, and other second-act products like it, continue to expand the types of problems we solve for our customers and the total addressable market we serve.

We will continue to invest in R&D so long as it demonstrates a significant return. Our investment philosophy is oriented around making many small, inexpensive bets — quickly terminating the ones that don’t work, and increasing investment in the ones that do. While we will consider M&A when opportunities present themselves, our bias is toward internal development tightly integrated into our efficient platform. We aim to build a massive business — slowly and consistently.

Finally, there are two of us signing this letter today, but three people started Cloudflare. Lee Holloway is our third co-founder and the genius who architected our platform and recruited and led our early technical team. Tragically, Lee stepped down from Cloudflare in 2015, suffering the debilitating effects of Frontotemporal Dementia, a rare neurological disease.

As we began the confidential process to go public, one of the early decisions was to pick the code name for our IPO. We chose “Project Holloway” to honor Lee’s contribution. More importantly, on a daily basis, the technical decisions Lee made, and the engineering team he built, are fundamental to the business we have become.

It has indeed been an incredible journey to have built Cloudflare into what it is today. We are grateful to our customers for their business and trust, to our team members for their dedication to our mission, and to our shareholders, and potential shareholders, for their support and encouragement.

And we’re just getting started.

Matthew Prince                     Michelle Zatlyn  Co-founder & CEO                Co-founder & COO

I have always loved birthdays. It is a chance to get together with loved ones, a chance to have fun and a chance to reflect on anything you want to keep doing or change in the upcoming year. At Cloudflare, we’ve embraced celebrating our birthday as well.

This week, Cloudflare turns 8 years old. It feels like just yesterday that Matthew, Lee, Matthieu, Ian, Sri, Chris, Damon and I stepped on stage at Techcrunch Disrupt to launch Cloudflare to the world. Since then, we have celebrated our birthday every year by giving a gift back to our customers and the Internet. This year, we plan to celebrate each day with a new product benefiting our community. Or in other words, it is a weeklong birthday celebration. Like I said, I love birthdays!

The Cloudflare team when we launched the service at Techcrunch Disrupt during September 27 to 29, 2010 – Matthieu, Chris, Sri, Ian, Lee, Matthew, Michelle and Damon.

While I can’t share exactly what we’re releasing every day — after all who doesn’t like a surprise? — I wanted to share some thoughts on how we decide what to release birthday week.

Our mission at Cloudflare is to help build a better Internet. That is a big, broad mission that means many things. It means that we push to make Internet properties faster. It means respecting individual’s privacy. It means making it harder for malicious actors to do bad things. It means helping to make the Internet more reliable. It means supporting new Internet standards and protocols, and making sure they are accessible to everyone. It means democratizing technology and making sure the widest possible group has access to it. It means increasing value for our community, while decreasing their costs. Here is more color on each:

As more applications go online, users expect the interactions to be fast. It is hard to imagine a world where people want a slower Internet experience. It’s the exact opposite — and will only continue.

Speed means high bandwidth and low latency. As we move along these two axes, more applications emerge. Music on the Internet was unlocked at a certain level of bandwidth. Video required more. Videoconferencing has both bandwidth and latency requirements. These technologies are reshaping entire industries — and having a impact on societies globally.

What’s exciting to me is that there are a whole host of further applications that will be unlocked as we continue to increase the speed of the internet. One of the things that will enable this is edge computing — moving the cloud closer to the internet visitors. Cloudflare released Workers a year ago (on our 7th Birthday), and we are so excited by what developers around the world are doing with it. We know a whole new set of applications are being planted right now and will emerge over the next 18 months because of this gained speed.

When we announced 1.1.1.1, our fast and private DNS service for consumers, we were blown away by the reception in the marketplace. People do care about their privacy and they are looking for solutions that understand that. When we build a product, we always ask ourselves how does this impact an individual’s privacy? We want to be a leader in terms of privacy.

The promise of Cloudflare has been to band businesses, people and organizations together to be stronger than the malicious actors. It’s the first time where the resources for the good people have outweighed resources for the bad people. Today, Cloudflare offers a broad security portfolio to its customers and we constantly work to make the services we have better, and to expand our scope. You will see our development in new areas on the security front this upcoming week.

While speed matters in unlocking new applications, so does reliability. There are a whole host of applications that can only be unlocked if they can depend on the internet being there. Transportation is one example; health care is another. If the internet breaks for these applications, life threatening things can start to happen very quickly, just as they would be if power was lost to these applications. But it’s not just examples where lives can get lost — if you’ve been in an office when the wifi has gone out, you’ll know that more and more businesses depend on the internet just to get day to day operations done. Cloudflare is committed to being at the forefront of a more reliable internet.

The original internet was designed as a decentralized network. One of the principles that enabled this to happen was to have a series of open standards that everyone agreed upon, as opposed to a series of balkanized networks that were all talking their own language. The original set of principles gave everyone a common language. This open set of standards let thousands of ideas bloom, and it is part of what has made the internet so great. We’re committed to that idea.

At the same time, the Internet is over 35 years old. Many smart, talented engineers around the world have come up with new protocols and standards that are faster and safer than the original protocols. But, getting these new protocols and standards distributed is difficult. We want to help distribute and drive adoption of new standards and protocols, and make access  easier for our customers. We’ve done it with HTTPS, SPDY, HTTP2, DNSSEC and there are more to come.

It is kind of crazy to think about the amount of timely information that we have access to today because of the Internet. And by and large, how it’s possible to communicate with any other person on the planet. But this only holds true if everyone is able to access the Internet. What do we mean by that? Well, it in turn breaks down into two further principles: democratization and affordability.

It’s one thing to have an open standard. That, in theory, allows anyone who understands the standard to participate. But go back to the early days of the web, and you really had to be a “techie” to be able to participate.

We’ve come a long way since those days; in terms of user clients, we’ve gone from a command line interface to a supercomputer with touch screens in our pockets. But there’s more to democratizing technology than just making it easier from the perspective of a consumer. There are also all the small businesses that are now possible, that were not previously so, because these entrepreneurs can use the internet to directly reach customers. It’s enabled all sorts of products and services that were not previously possible.

Many of those businesses would not be able to start if the tools and infrastructure required to get going are beyond their technical grasp. One of the things that Cloudflare has been committed to from the start is taking complicated and technical solutions and making it easy enough for a non-technical person to use. We have wanted to expand the number of Internet properties who have access to these services. Millions of customers around the world fit this profile. We might have one of the fastest and most secure networks on the web fit for enterprises like New York Stock Exchange and IBM. But if you’re a one man shop just getting started, you shouldn’t need an IT team to be able to make your website fast and secure. With Cloudflare, you don’t have to.

As the Internet grows, it becomes more valuable, and capabilities become lower cost. This is one of the powers of network effects. We have many examples of this at Cloudflare. We want more connections to other Internet providers around the world so that we can pass bandwidth savings along to our customers. Or, last year during our 7th Birthday, we pushed our DDoS mitigation technology to all of our plans, including the Free plan. This is technology that used to cost at least $10K/month. We are always looking to deliver more value to our customers. It is a daily topic around Cloudflare.

So, back to our Birthday Week. Every announcement this week ties back to helping to build a better Internet in some way. Here is a preview of this week’s releases:

• On Monday, we are releasing something that will make the Internet more private and secure for every user.

• On Tuesday, we are leading the way democratizing a new Internet standard, while also making the Internet faster.

• On Wednesday, we are bringing together a coalition of partners to help our customers lower their infrastructure costs — dramatically.

• On Thursday, our actual birthday, we are releasing a new service we hope you’ll love that provides something that every one of our customers needs, but now with the best security and lowest price.

• On Friday, we are releasing a new product that pushes the power of the Internet forward by making it more programmable.

I often get asked what makes Cloudflare special? My answer always comes back to the people I work with and our partners who work passionately to delight our customers. The Cloudflare team comes to work every day to solve the tough challenges of the Internet to ultimately help build a better Internet going forward. This week, I am excited to share our work with all of you.

Every day, we will be posting a blog post at 1200 UTC with that day’s announcement. We will do a round up at the end of the week as well. I can’t wait to hear what you think!

The three Cloudflare co-founders: Matthew Prince, Michelle Zatlyn and Lee Holloway

Launching Cloudflare at Techcrunch Disrupt in September 2010 to a panel of esteemed judges

Matthew Prince, our CEO, presenting Cloudflare to a group of entrepreneurs.

The three co-founders, Michelle Zatlyn, Lee Holloway and Matthew Prince, at one of our office openings early on

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We just turned up Calgary, Saskatoon and Winnipeg - Cloudflare’s 143rd, 144th, and 145th data centers. This brings our Canadian presence to six cities, joining Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver. I grew up just outside of Saskatoon, so I couldn’t be happier that Cloudflare’s network has expanded to the Canadian Prairies. My parents still live there and I just booked flights to go and visit them this summer. When I tell people that I grew up in Saskatchewan, most people don’t know a lot about the region, so I wanted to share some of my favorite things about the region, starting from west to east:

• Calgary was home to the 1988 Winter Olympics and is a 90 minute drive from Banff, an incredible National Park that is absolutely worth visiting. Calgary has grown quickly over the last twenty years because of all the natural resources, including oil and gas. They host a famous rodeo, Calgary Stampede, for 10 days every summer. Definitely something to add to your bucket list. With Cloudflare’s new deployment in Calgary, we’ll make the Internet even faster for visitors. Hello Calgary!

• About 1 million people live in the province of Saskatchewan. Saskatoon is the largest city, while Regina is the capital of the province. Saskatoon is an under the radar city which is gaining steam. Vogue wrote it up in late 2016 as a place to visit. There is a brand new art museum that opened called the Remai Modern. Drive two hours north and you’ll find amazing lakes, and northern lights. My favorite lake is Waskesiu but you can’t go wrong with any of them. (Fun fact - there are more lakes than roads in Saskatchewan).

• Winnipeg is the city I have been to the least out of the three - mainly because it was a really far drive from where I grew up. Winnipeg is considered the “gateway to the west” and so an important transportation and railway hub. It’s a cultural center in Canada and home to many museums, including the Canadian Museum of Human Rights. One thing that always struck me about Winnipeg is that it is home to one of the windiest corners in North America - Portage + Main. While you can’t technically measure climate by street corner (yet), I’m pretty sure it is the windiest corner I have ever stood on.

Photo by Johny Goerend / Unsplash

The Canadian prairies are gorgeous, and home to some of the kindest people you will meet. I am proud that we are making the Internet faster, safer and more reliable for folks in that region.

Cloudflare is a participant at Calgary Internet Exchange (YYCIX), Saskatoon Internet Exchange (YXEIX) and Manitoba Internet Exchange (MBIX). We are big fans of the many volunteers who have worked hard to build these interconnection points, and foster an ecosystem around them. While all three cities currently have fairly limited local interconnection, Cloudflare is encouraging more ISPs to not just peer traffic in Canada (instead of the US), but interconnect across the Prairies as well.

The end of March is nearing and our team is working hard to hit our goal of 150 cities. Where to next?

This map reflects the network as of the publish date of this blog post. For the most up to date directory of locations please refer to our Network Map on the Cloudflare site.

Through a series of fireside chats and panel discussions, featured speakers will discuss the top technology trends shaping business today, including cyber security, mobility, and the Internet of Things. These compelling perspectives will offer insights into the future of the global Internet and its implications on society.

Featured speakers include:

• Toomas Hendrik Ilves, The President of Estonia

• Alex Stamos, chief security officer of Facebook

• Matt Grob, chief technology officer of Qualcomm

• Andrew Ng, chief scientist at Baidu

• Nicole Wong, former US deputy CTO & legal director for products at Twitter

• Andy McAfee, MIT professor & author of "The Second Machine Age"

• Cindy Cohn, executive director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation

• Adam Langley, security engineer at Google

• David Brin, scientist, best-selling author & tech-futurist

• Rajiv Pant, former chief technology officer of The New York Times

• Larry Smarr, former head of the San Diego Supercomputing Center

• Al Gore, Former Vice President of the United States (by video presentation)

We believe that five years from now the Internet will be dramatically different from what it is today. By connecting this distinguished group of leading technologists, we hope to assemble an outline of what the new Internet landscape will look like. By looking ahead together, we can all begin to prepare for the coming changes.

While this is an invite-only event, we’re making 15 Internet Summit invitations available to the public. You’ll join attendees from established companies and forward-thinking startups like Google, Mozilla, VMWare, Box, Dollar Shave Club, and Dwolla.

The Internet Summit will be held at CloudFlare’s new headquarters, located in San Francisco’s SOMA neighborhood, on Thursday, September 24th. The event will run from 11 a.m. – 5 p.m. PT.

If you’d like to join the Internet Summit, visit CloudFlare’s Internet Summit page for your chance to be invited. Tell us why you should be part of CloudFlare’s Internet Summit, as well as your full name, email address, and company/organization to enter. Selected applicants will receive an invitation to CloudFlare’s Internet Summit no later than Tuesday, September 22nd, 2015.

Hope to see you there!

Today, we're making managing Page Rules even easier with Page Rules reordering.

Page Rules are applied in the order they appear in your CloudFlare dashboard, from top to bottom. The order matters, since the first Page Rule to match the request is applied. So, if you want to apply aggressive caching to a specific set of pages but exclude caching on one login or admin URL, you'd put the exclude caching Page Rule above the aggressive caching Page Rule.

Before today, reordering Page Rules was cumbersome. You had to delete and re-add Page Rules in the order that you wanted them to be applied. Now, you can easily reorder Page Rules by clicking on the icon to the left and dragging them up or down.

If you're not familiar with Page Rules or not sure how to use them, review this tutorial.

Page Rules are found in the menu available under the gear icon in My Websites, as shown in this screenshot.

Reordering feature is available now for all customers, with the number of Page Rules set by plan type: Free domains get 3, Pro domains get 20, Business domains get 50, and Enterprise domains get a custom number.

CloudFlare makes caching easy. Our service automatically determines what files to cache based on file extensions. Performance benefits kick in automatically.

For customers that want advanced caching, beyond the defaults, we have Cache Everything available as Page Rules. Designate a URL and CloudFlare will cache everything, including HTML, out at the edges of our global network.

With Cache Everything, we respect all headers. If there is any header in place from the server or a CMS solution like WordPress, we will respect it. However, we got many requests from customers who wanted an easy way to override any existing headers. Today, we are releasing a new feature called 'Edge cache expire TTL' that does just that.

Edge cache expire TTL is the setting that controls how long CloudFlare's edge servers will cache a resource before requesting a fresh copy from your server. When you create a Cache Everything Page Rule, you now may choose whether to respect all existing headers or to override any headers that are in place from your server. By overwriting the headers, CloudFlare will cache more content at the CloudFlare edge network, decreasing load to your server.

Common situations where you may choose to overwrite existing headers:

• You expect a large surge in traffic

• You are under DDOS attack

• You are not sure what the headers on WordPress or your server are set to

• You are using WordPress and want to easily overwrite the default settings

It is important to emphasize when you do not want to use Cache Everything. If you have any personalized information on the page like login information or credit card information, you do not want to use the Cache Everything option.**What is Browser Cache Expire TTL?**Browser cache expire TTL is the time that CloudFlare instructs a visitor's browser to cache a resource. Until this time expires, the browser will load the resource from its local cache thus speeding up the request significantly. CloudFlare will respect the headers that you give us from your web server, and then we will communicate with the browser based on the time selected in this drop down menu.

When you'd like to have CloudFlare cache your content but want your visitors to always get a fresh copy of the page, you can use the new 'Edge cache expire TTL' setting to express this differentiation. Set a value for 'Edge cache expire TTL' to how often you want the CloudFlare CDN to refresh from your server, and 'Browser cache expire TTL' to how often you want your visitors' browsers to refresh the page content. This is useful when you have a rapidly changing page but still want the benefit of the CloudFlare cache to reduce your server load.

CloudFlare offers a range of edge cache expire TTLs based on plan type:

• Free 2 hours

• Pro 1 hour

• Business 30 minutes

• Enterprise as low as 30 seconds

A Pro customer may set the refetch time to 1 hour. After 60 minutes, we return to your server for a fresh copy of the resource. Business customers may lower the refetch interval to 30 minutes. Enterprise customers may set this interval as low as 30 seconds.

Login in to your CloudFlare account and choose "Page Rules" from under the gear icon. Enter the URL that you want to Cache Everything (under Custom Caching):

The edge cache server TTL option will appear:

The default setting is set to "Respect all existing headers." To override this setting, choose a time from the drop down menu:

You can find more information in our knowledge base articles here and here.

Give it a try and let us know what you think.

CloudFlare launched at TechCrunch Disrupt San Francisco in September 2010. When you walked in the front door of that conference, the first booth you came to was the one for Media Temple. We immediately hit it off with the company that is focused on delivering their customers a solid service with great design.

Over the last year, we've build a close relationship. After many emails, several phone calls, and a quick trip to LA, Matthew, CloudFlare's CEO and cofounder, met with the Media Temple CEO at TechCrunch Disrupt New York. He understood the benefits immediately. What was clear to him was clear to our entire team and community: Media Temple and CloudFlare are a great match.

Up until today, we've had several thousand Media Temple customers sign up for our service through our website. What is different today is you can click a single button in the Media Temple interface and begin to enjoy the benefits of CloudFlare without having to change anything else. We're excited to welcome Media Temple as a CloudFlare Certified Hosting Provider.

If you're a Media Temple customer, and you're already on CloudFlare, there's nothing you need to do. If you're a Media Temple customer, and you're not yet on CloudFlare, look for the CloudFlare button in your (mt) AccountCenter. One click and your site will be twice as fast and protected from bad people.

It feels like CloudFlare and Media Temple have long been old friends. We're excited to affirm that friendship and make it possible for all of our users to get the benefits of both platforms.

Resources:Learn more about CloudFlare at Media Temple here

CloudFlare is a service that has powerful underlying technology. We run 10 (with more coming) data centers around the world and do DNS, caching, bot filtering and more for all of our users. Despite all of this technology, our goal is to make the service simple for our users to use. Here is a "pocket guide" for use after signing up with CloudFlare.

If you need to add or edit entries to your DNS records, you can doso by going to:

Your Websites->Settings->DNS settings

While CloudFlare can resolve DNS for all of your subdomains, CloudFlare can only proxy domains that would be considered web traffic (www, blog, etc.). Subdomains like ftp, mail should be marked with a gray cloud. You can find the entire list of what should be marked with a gray cloud here.

If you have a wildcard (*) subdomain, CloudFlare does not proxywildcard domains. You have to explicitly list the subdomains that you want to be accelerated and protected CloudFlare in your DNS zone file.

The CloudFlare Settings page is where you will find all of the optional features that can be turned on or off. Some key features on this page include:

CloudFlare Rocket LoaderThis is a new beta service that we are really excited about. For websites that have any third-party apps like ads or widgets, Rocket Loader helps make the apps load faster by loading the JavaScript asynchronously. The result are pages that feel much snappier! This service is still in beta, so while we encourage you to try it on your site, if you notice any issues with your apps afterwards, turn it off and then file a bug report here.

Basic Security Level SettingsYou can set the security level for your website to high, medium, low or essentially off. It defaults to Medium.

Development ModeTurn this option on when you're making changes to static files(javascript, CSS, images, etc.) on your site that you want to appearimmediately.

Purge CacheIf you want to clear the CloudFlare cache of all the static files for a domain, you can use Purge Cache.

To get to CloudFlare Settings:CloudFlare --> Websites --> Settings (pull down menu) --> CloudFlare Settings

Since CloudFlare acts as a reverse proxy for you site, your visitor logs will show our IP addresses unless you make a modification to your server. We have a group of resources available here, including for Apache servers.

Note: WordPress users have the option of installing the WordPressplugin Joomla users have the option of installing the Joomlaplugin.

Whitelisting our IP ranges with your hosting provider or in your IP tables ensures all of your website's requests are served properly.

Note: CloudFlare customers that are activated through our hostingpartners (full list can be found here), includingHostGator, VEXXHost, CoolHandle, A2 Hosting are not required to takethis step.

We run 10 data centers on three continents and we are constantly monitoring our systems. To get the most current updates, you can follow our:

• System status page

• Twitter System Status account

With the Pro service, you receive four main additional benefits:

1. Faster subsequent page loads (so the second, third and fourth page loads are much quicker)

2. Web Application Firewall to protect from comment spam, SQL injection and XSS attacks

3. SSL compatibility

4. Stats updates every 15 minutes (vs 24 hours)

The Pro service is done on a month by month basis so you can easily try it for a month by choosing "Upgrade to Pro" in your CloudFlare account.

Also see:

• CloudFlare and accessing cpanel

• CloudFlare and how to ftp or ssh

• Frequently used CloudFlare Settings

If you ever have a question, please contact us. We read every email that we get and love to hear from our users.

We always talk about how CloudFlare gets smarter, and we do that in a variety of ways. One of the ways is that we look at changes in traffic to a site. If there is a big change, then our system automatically starts to investigate whether it is legitimate traffic or an attack. If it is not legitimate traffic, then the system automatically starts to learn and starts to stop the new threats at our edge nodes, before they hit the site's server. Not only is that information helpful to the site in question, but it gets shared across the entire CloudFlare community so everyone benefits.

Here is a fantastic visualization of CloudFlare getting smarter in action. One of our user's site was under a denial of service (ddos) attack earlier this week. You can see the surge in traffic (the green line). Then, soon after, you can see the CloudFlare system start to learn from the change in data and start identifying that the new traffic is indeed an attack (red line), rather than a surge in legitimate traffic. As CloudFlare starts to identify the new traffic as an attack, the system starts to block it at our edge nodes around the world. This means that the site is safe from the attack, there is less load to their server and legitimate traffic to their site is totally unaffected.

When we shared the situation with the website owner, he summed it up best when he said: "That's freaking awesome!" We couldn't agree more.

Since CloudFlare continually gets smarter, any site, regardless of its size, benefits the entire community. You can sign up for a Free account here. With CloudFlare, you'll get web security protection for your site regardless of plan type.