The 2024 French legislative election runoff on July 7 yielded surprising results compared to the first round on June 30, with the New Popular Front (NPF) gaining the most seats, followed by French President Macron’s Ensemble, and the National Rally. Coalition negotiations will follow. In this post, we examine the ongoing online attacks against French political parties and how initial election predictions at 20:00 local time led to a noticeable drop in France’s Internet traffic.

This blog post is part of a series tracking the numerous elections of 2024. We have covered elections in South Africa, India, Iceland, Mexico, the European Union, the UK and also the 2024 US presidential debate. We also continuously update our election report on Cloudflare Radar.

Let’s start with the attacks, and then move on to the Internet traffic trends.

As we highlighted last week, the first round of the French elections saw specific DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attacks targeting French political party websites. While online attacks are common and not always election-related, recent activities in France, the Netherlands, and the UK confirm that DDoS attacks frequently target political parties during election periods.

Two French political parties were attacked shortly before the first round of elections, and a third party was targeted on June 30. This third party, indicated in green on the chart below, faced attacks on the evening of June 29. Several attempts were thwarted by Cloudflare throughout election day, from 10:00 to 23:00 UTC (12:00 to 01:00 local time). The most intense attack occurred at 19:00 UTC (21:00 local time), reaching nearly 40,000 requests per second, with a total of 620 million DDoS requests recorded on that day (June 29).

Our data indicates that the most significant attack Cloudflare intercepted targeted a party shown in yellow on the chart above. The party had already been attacked on June 23, 2024, and this subsequent attack happened on July 3 at 21:36 UTC (23:36 local time), lasting four minutes and peaking at 151,000 requests per second (rps), making it the second-largest attack we’ve observed on political parties recently. This was comparable in intensity and duration to another attack on a UK political party right after their election.

On the runoff election day, July 7, the party represented by the blue line was again a target, having been attacked previously on June 24, 27, and 29. The most severe of these occurred on June 27, with attacks reaching 118,000 rps during a day that totaled 610 million daily DDoS requests. On July 7, the attacks resumed, with the first starting at 09:55 UTC (11:55 local time) and continuing sporadically until 23:18 UTC (01:18 local time on July 8). The peak of these attacks came at 11:40 UTC (13:40 local time), reaching 96,000 rps.

While these rates may seem small to Cloudflare, they can be devastating for websites not well-protected against such high levels of traffic. DDoS attacks not only overwhelm systems but also serve, if successful, as a distraction for IT teams while attackers attempt other types of breaches.

Each election brings its own unique circumstances. For instance, the UK’s snap election took place on Thursday, July 4, 2024, aligning with Britain’s tradition of weekday elections. In contrast, France and many other countries hold elections on weekends, typically Sundays.

During the first round of the French elections on June 30, morning traffic was lower than the previous week and rose in the afternoon. The runoff, a week later, displayed a different pattern. Morning traffic remained stable compared to June 30, but it saw a significant decrease in the afternoon, especially after 17:30 local time. Polling stations in major cities closed at 20:00. At this time, TV media began broadcasting the first results, causing a 16% drop in traffic compared to the previous week. This trend, where traffic dips as initial results are announced, is also seen in other elections, like the UK’s.

Traffic shifts during voting day, compared to the previous week, are more revealing when viewed in detail. The map and table below summarize the traffic changes observed at the state level within France, when voting closed and initial results predictions were revealed on TV at around 20:00 local time. This was the moment when, from Cloudflare’s data perspective, attention was diverted from online use.

(Source: Cloudflare; created with Datawrapper)

The table below shows the drops in traffic on July 7, at 20:00 local time, compared to the previous week.

On election day in France, Internet traffic decreased most significantly in the regions of Bourgogne-Franche-Comté and Grand Est, both in the eastern part of the country and both experiencing a 19% drop. When comparing these regions to the Île-de-France region, where Paris is located, we see a smaller traffic decrease, at 10%. In the south, in regions like Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur, the drop was even less pronounced, at 7%.

Also notable was the increase in mobile device request traffic share during both election days, driving the share to levels higher than usual. Over the past month, mobile device traffic share on Sundays typically ranged from 53% to 54%. However, it rose to 57% on the first election day, June 30, and increased further to 58% on the runoff day, July 7, 2024. Mobile device traffic share was especially elevated from 11:00 to 22:00 local time on these days.

Switching focus to domain trends, our 1.1.1.1 resolver DNS data reveals a targeted impact from the French elections, allowing for a comparison between the two election days. Analyzing French news media outlets, DNS traffic in France was significantly higher on the first election day, June 30, with a 250% increase at 20:00 local time compared to the previous week. This was 6% higher than on the runoff day, July 7.

For French TV domains, the situation reversed during the runoff on July 7, showing 31% more DNS traffic at 20:00 local time than in the first round. On June 30, DNS traffic at that time was already 274% higher than the previous week, but the increase on July 7 was even more significant, at 391% compared to June 23, 2024—the Sunday before the two election days.

For microblogging social media in France, traffic was higher during the two election days, peaking on the first round. At the close of voting polls at 20:00 local time on June 30, traffic surged 38% compared to June 23, 2024. On July 7, runoff day, traffic increased by 32% at 20:00 local time compared to June 23, but was 4% lower than on June 30.​

In France, more attention was diverted from the Internet during the decisive runoff election day than in the first round, with a noticeable dip in traffic when TV stations announced predicted results at 20:00 local time.

If you want to follow more trends and insights about the Internet and elections in particular, you can check Cloudflare Radar, and more specifically our new 2024 Elections Insights report, which will be updated as elections take place throughout the year.

Since last week, we’ve updated our trends to include last-minute voting during the elections in Iran on June 28, 2024, and the suspension of mobile Internet in Mauritania following protests after the presidential elections on June 29, 2024, and the UK election.

Last week, the French national data protection authority (the Commission Nationale de l'informatique et des Libertés or “CNIL”), published guidelines for what it considers to be a GDPR-compliant way of loading Google Analytics and similar marketing technology tools. The CNIL published these guidelines following notices that the CNIL and other data protection authorities issued to several organizations using Google Analytics stating that such use resulted in impermissible data transfers to the United States. Today, we are excited to announce a set of features and a practical step-by-step guide for using Zaraz that we believe will help organizations continue to use Google Analytics and similar tools in a way that will help protect end user privacy and avoid sending EU personal data to the United States. And the best part? It takes less than a minute.

Enter Cloudflare Zaraz.

What we are releasing today is a new set of privacy features to help our customers enhance end user privacy. Starting today, on the Zaraz dashboard, you can apply the following configurations:

• Remove URL query parameters: when toggled-on, Zaraz will remove all query parameters from a URL that is reported to a third-party server. It will turn [https://example.com/?q=hello](https://example.com/?q=hello) to https://example.com. This will allow users to remove  query parameters, such as UTM, gclid, and the sort that can be used for fingerprinting. This setting will apply to all of your Zaraz integrations.

• Hide originating IP address: using Zaraz to load tools like Google Analytics entirely server-side while hiding visitor IP addresses from Google and Facebook has been doable for quite some time now. This will prevent sending the visitor IP address to a third-party tool provider’s server. This feature is configured at a tool level, currently offered for Google Analytics Universal, Google Analytics 4, and Facebook Pixel. We will add this capability to more and more tools as we go. In addition to hiding visitors’ IP addresses from specific tools, you can use Zaraz to trim visitors’ IP addresses across all tools to avoid sending originating IP addresses to third-party tool servers. This option is available on the Zaraz setting page, and is considered less strict.

• Clear user agent strings: when toggled on, Zaraz will clear sensitive information from the User Agent String. The User-Agent is a request header that includes information about the operating system, browser, extensions and more of the site visitor. Zaraz clears this string by removing pieces of information (such as versions, extensions, and more) that could lead to user tracking or fingerprinting. This setting will apply only to server-side integrations.

• Removal of external referrers: when toggled-on, Zaraz will hide the URL of the referring page from third-party servers. If the referring URL is on the same domain, it will not hide it, to keep analytics accurate and avoid the session from “splitting”. This setting will apply to all of your Zaraz integrations.

We wrote this guide to help you implement our new features when using Google Analytics. We will use Google Analytics (Universal) as the example of this guide, because Google Analytics is widely used by Zaraz customers. You can follow the same principles to set up your Facebook Pixel, or other server-side integration that Zaraz offers.

Zaraz loads automatically for every website proxied by Cloudflare (Orange Clouded), no code changes are needed. If your website is not proxied by Cloudflare, you can load Zaraz manually with a JavaScript code snippet. If you are new to Cloudflare, or unsure if your website is proxied by Cloudflare, you can use this Chrome extension to find out if your site is Orange Clouded or not.

All customers have access to the Zaraz dashboard. By default, when you add Google Analytics using the Zaraz tools library, it will load server-side. You do not need to set up any cloud environment or proxy server. Zaraz handles this for you. When you add a tool, Zaraz will start loading on your website, and a request will leave from the end user’s browser to a Cloudflare Worker that sits on your own domain. Cloudflare Workers is our edge computing platform, and this Worker will communicate directly with Google Analytics’ servers. There will be no direct communication between an end user’s browser and Google’s servers. If you wish to learn more about how Zaraz works, please read our previous posts about the unique Zaraz architecture and how we use Workers. Note that “proxying” Google Analytics, by itself, is not enough, according to the CNIL’s guidance. You will have to take more actions to make sure you set up Google Analytics properly.

All you need to do to set up Google Analytics is to enter your Tracking ID. On the tools setting screen, you would also need to toggle-on the “Hide Originating IP Address” feature. This will prevent Zaraz from sending the visitor’s IP address to Google. Zaraz will remove the IP address on the Edge, before it hits Google’s servers. If you want to make sure Zaraz will run only in the EU, review Cloudflare’s Data Localization Suite.

According to your needs, you can of course set up more complex configurations of Google Analytics, including Ecommerce tracking, Custom Dimension, fields to set, Custom Metrics, etc. Follow this guide for more instructions.

Next, you will need to toggle-on all of our new privacy features mentioned above. You can do this on the Zaraz Settings page, under the Privacy section.

In this step, you would need to take actions to clean your specific Google Analytics setting. We gathered a list of suggestions for you to help preserve end user privacy:

• Do not include any personal identifiable information. You will want to review the CNIL’s guidance on anonymization and determine how to apply it on your end. It is likely that such anonymization will make the unique identifier pretty much useless with most analytics tools. For example, according to our findings, features like Google Analytics’ User ID View, won’t work well with such anonymization. In such cases, you may want to stop using such analytics tools to avoid discrepancies and assure accuracy.

• If you wish to hide Google Analytics’ Client ID, on the Google Analytics setting page, click “add field” and choose “Client ID”. To override the Client ID, you can insert any string as the field’s constant value. Please note that this will likely limit Google’s ability to aggregate data and will likely create discrepancies in session and user counts. Still, we’ve seen customers that are using Google Analytics to count events, and to our knowledge that should still be doable with this setting.

• Clean your implementation from cross-site identifiers. This could include things like your CRM tool unique identifier, or URL query parameters passing identifiers to share them between different domains (avoid “cross-domain tracking” also known as “site linking”).

• You would need to make sure not to include any personal data in your customized configuration and implementation. We recommend you go over the list of Custom Dimension, Event parameters/properties, Ecommerce Data, and User Properties to make sure they do not contain personal data. While this still demands some manual work, the good news is that soon we are about to announce a new set of Privacy features, Zaraz Data Loss Prevention, that will help you do that automatically, at scale. Stay tuned!

A few more things you will want to consider is that implementing this guide will result in some limitations in your ability to use Google Analytics. For example, not collecting UTM parameters and referrers will disable your ability to track traffic sources and campaigns. Not tracking User ID, will prevent you from using the User ID View, and so on. Some companies will find these limitations extreme, but like most things in life, there is a trade-off. We’re taking a step towards a more privacy-oriented web, and this is just the beginning. In the face of new regulatory constraints, new technologies will appear which will unlock new abilities and features. Zaraz is dedicated to leading the way, offering privacy-focused tools that empower website operators and protect end users.

We recommend you learn more about Cloudflare’s Data Localization Suite, and how you can use Zaraz to keep analytics data in the EU.

To wrap up, we would really appreciate any feedback on this announcement, or new feature requests you might have. You can reach out to your Cloudflare account manager, or directly to us on our Discord channel. Privacy is at the heart of everything our team is building.

We always take a proactive approach towards privacy, and we believe privacy is not only about responding to different regulations, it is about building technology that helps customers do a better job protecting their users. It is about simplifying what it takes to respect and protect user privacy and personal information. It is about helping build a better Internet.

We blogged previously about some trends concerning the first round of the 2022 French presidential election, held on April 10. Here we take a look at the run-off election this Sunday, April 24, that ended up re-electing Emmanuel Macron as President of France.

First, the two main trends: French-language news sites outside France were clearly impacted by the local rule that states that exit polls can only be published after 20:00.

And Internet traffic was similar on both the election days (April 10 and 24) and that includes the increase in use of mobile devices and interest in news websites — there we also saw a clear interest in the Macron-Le Pen debate on April 20.

We have discussed before that election days usually don’t have a major impact on overall Internet traffic. Let’s compare April 10 with 24, the two Sundays when the elections were held. The trends throughout the day are incredibly similar (with a slight increase in traffic on April 24), even with a two-week gap between them.

Another election-day trend is the use of mobile devices to access the Internet, mainly at night. The largest spikes in number of requests made using mobile devices in France during April seemed to be all election-related:

#1. April 10 (first round of the election), 21:00 local time. 58% of traffic by mobile devices.

#2. April 24 (second round of the  election), 22:00. 57% mobile traffic.

#3. April 20 (presidential debate), 22:00. 56% mobile traffic.

Not only did both the election Sundays (after the polling stations were closed) have an impact on mobile traffic in France, but the presidential debate (Wednesday, April 20) had the same type of impact, increasing requests from mobile devices.

The TV debate was seen by 15.6 million viewers in France and lasted between 21:00 and 22:45, local time; at the same time mobile traffic was higher than in any other Wednesday and was the #3 spike of April, with 10% more mobile requests than in the previous Wednesday at the same time.

For the elections, local rules state that French media is barred from publishing partial results or polls of any kind until 20:00, the time when voting stations in metropolitan France officially close. So, that means that French news outlets have to wait for the allotted hour to give official projections.

Given that, we looked at French-language news websites from French-speaking countries like Switzerland and Belgium. They aren’t bound by French law and can show information about exit polls earlier (bear in mind that in most French cities polling stations close at 19:00 and only in the bigger cities does it go on until 20:00).

For example, the Swiss Le Temps published exit polls at 19:30.

We can clearly see that requests to French-language news sites outside France clearly spiked earlier than those in France. News websites in France had spikes after 20:00 local time on both elections days, but Belgian and Swiss news sites had major increases in traffic at 19:00 on April 10 (1857% more than the previous Sunday!). For the runoff elections on April 24, the biggest spike of the month was at 18:00 (3100% more requests than the previous Sunday), but it was also higher than on previous days one hour later, at 19:00 (3080% higher).

There are no spikes at all related to the French debate (April 20), so that seems to show that those Belgian and Swiss news sites had a huge increase of French citizens eager to see the polls before 20:00.

We saw two weeks ago that official election websites had a clear spike in requests on April 10, the first round of the elections. Here we’re looking at DNS request trends to get a sense of traffic to Internet properties.

Official French election-related websites had an increase in traffic throughout the week prior to the first round, after Monday, April 4, but it’s no surprise that the two major spikes were on both the elections' day. How much? Here is the breakdown by bigger spikes in traffic:

#1. April 10 (first round of the election), 00:00 local time. 925% more requests than the previous Sunday (at the same time).

#2. April 24  (second round of the election), 20:00. 707% more requests.

#3. April 10 (first round of the election), 20:00. 370% more requests.

#3. April 11, 10:00. 115% more requests than the previous Monday.

(there’s a draw at these last two spikes)

Regarding the main French news websites, as we saw two weeks ago, 20:00 local time, after the polling stations are all closed, and the first major polls are revealed continues to be the time of the biggest spikes of the whole month.

The biggest spike of the month in our aggregate DNS chart, that shows trends from 12 news websites, was definitely on April 10, the first round election day, around 20:00 local time, when those domains had 116% more traffic than at the same time on the previous Sunday. And the second-biggest spike was the runoff election day, on April 24, at the same time (20:00 local time), with an increase of 142% in traffic compared to the previous Sunday at the same time.

Very close to those two spikes is Monday morning, April 11, after the first round of the elections. At 10:00 local time requests were 45% higher than in the previous Monday. The Macron-Le Pen debate on Wednesday, April 20, also had a spike. At 21:00, when it was starting, requests were 56% higher than on the previous Wednesday.

The same trend is seen on the major French TV station websites, with a clear isolated spike on April 10 (the first round election day) at 20:00 local time, with a 472% increase in traffic compared to the previous Sunday, when the main exit polls were announced. Something similar, at the same time (20:00), on April 24, with a 375% increase in requests compared to the previous Sunday.

That’s only matched, again, by the April 20 debate. At 21:00 traffic was 308% higher than the previous Wednesday, so people were clearly taking notice of the debate and checking news outlets and TV station websites — there were French sites like france.tv that transmitted via streaming.

When people are really eager to see something as important as election results, they go and search where the first polls are (in this case, before 20:00 local time, they are outside France).

Also, in two different election moments in France separated by two weeks, there are clear similarities in Internet trends that show the way people use the Internet during election periods. That’s more clear when results start to arrive, but also a debate as important for a presidential election as the Le Pen-Macron one, also impacts not only the Internet traffic but also the attention to news and TV websites.

You can keep an eye on these trends using Cloudflare Radar.

I am incredibly excited to announce that I have joined Cloudflare as its Head of France to help build a better Internet and expand the company’s growing customer base in France. This is an important milestone for Cloudflare as we continue to grow our presence in Europe. Alongside our London, Munich, and Lisbon offices, Paris marks the fourth Cloudflare office in the EMEA region. With this, we’ll be able to further serve our customers’ demand, recruit local talent, and build on the successes we’ve had in our other offices around the globe. I have been impressed by what Cloudflare has built in EMEA including France, and I am even more excited by what lies ahead for our customers, partners, and employees.

Born in Paris and raised in Paris, Normandie and Germany, I started my career more than 20 years ago. While a teenager, I had the chance to work on one of the first Apple IIe’s available in France. I have always had a passion for technology and continue to be amazed by the value of its adoption with businesses large and small. In former roles as Solution Engineer to Account Manager, Partner Director to Sales Director, and more recently Country Manager—I’ve had the chance to manage different sizes of businesses and teams, and am passionate about seeking out and providing the best solutions and value to customers and their challenging yet unique needs.

In 2011, I opened the Amazon Web Services office in France. Over the last nine years, I have advised and helped a large number of companies, across varying industries and sizes, move from on-premise infrastructure to cloud and SaaS architectures. I have seen that this major and inevitable transition has increased, exponentially, the complexity of architecture with heterogeneous infrastructure environments across public cloud, on-premise, and hybrid deployments. The threat landscape, functional requirements, and scale of business applications have evolved faster than ever before, and the volume and sophistication of network attacks can strain the defensive capabilities of even the most advanced enterprises. This is forcing a major architectural shift in how enterprises address security, performance, and reliability at the network layer.

Today, companies’ digital assets (web properties, applications, APIs, and on) have become their most valuable asset. How organizations are able to use the Internet to serve their customers, partners, and employees—is now a strategic priority for organizations around the world. Cloudflare is leading this transition.

Here are four reasons why I’m joining and embarking on this amazing journey.

• Cloudflare’s customer base and growth: I have been impressed with the growth, technology, and pace of adoption behind the company’s suite of products. Cloudflare is servicing Internet properties of more than 3.2 million customers that are relying on us around the world, including approximately 16 percent of the Fortune 1000 companies. From the public sector to enterprises to startups—companies of all sizes and types are being powered by these critical security, performance, and reliability services. Every day thousands of new customers sign up for Cloudflare services.

• Cloudflare’s Global Network: I discovered early on that Cloudflare is powered by its global network that is always learning and growing. This means, as companies grow and expand, Cloudflare will be able to help them scale and support their growth. This network spans more than 200 cities in over 100 countries. With more than 1 billion unique IP addresses passing through it every day, it works as an immune system continuously learning and adapting to new threats, as well as optimizing itself which benefits all of Cloudflare customers and users worldwide. Cloudflare’s network operates within 100 milliseconds of 99% of the Internet-connected population in the developed world (for context, the blink of an eye is 300-400 milliseconds!). What’s more, this network blocked on average 76 billion cyber threats each day last quarter.

• Cloudflare’s technology and pace of innovation: At Cloudflare, the pace of innovation has stunned me. Leveraging its unique global network, the company is continuously releasing new products and features in the cloud that are available at a massive scale—worldwide to its customers and users. I discovered some products which are disrupting traditional IT approaches. To name a few: Cloudflare One, a platform to connect and secure companies and teams anywhere (remote and across offices) and on any device; Cloudflare Workers, a serverless solution redefining how applications are deployed at the network edge; Magic Transit, which delivers the power of Cloudflare services for your on-premise, cloud-hosted, and hybrid networks; Argo Smart Routing which acts as Waze for the Internet, can significantly cut the amount of time users online spend waiting for content; and Cloudflare Web Analytics, a privacy-first solution to give marketers and web creators the information they need in a simple, clean way that doesn't sacrifice visitor privacy.

• The company’s culture. During the interview process, I had the chance to meet many Cloudflare employees including some of the leadership team. I met a very diverse team of incredibly smart, curious, kind, and committed people. I was impressed by the builder mindset in all of the people I talked to, and all are truly passionate about the Cloudflare mission. I also loved the culture of openness, collaboration, and transparency—which aligns with the values I have embraced since I started my career. This wider Cloudflare mission has resonated with me: to help build a better Internet. In doing this, we provide organizations with powerful technologies that, previously, could only be used by those that could afford those large expenses and complexities to implement and maintain.

In France, you can find a vibrant startup ecosystem, large enterprises, and a very active SMB business environment. Cloudflare has had customers in France from the very early days and today we have thousands of French customers spanning the country from not only startups, to SMBs and enterprises, but also government, education, and non-profit organizations. More than 25 percent of the CAC 40 are using Cloudflare services. Major French enterprises such as L’Oréal, Solocal, Criteo, Allianz France, DPD Group (le Groupe LaPoste), and more are protecting and accelerating their Internet properties with Cloudflare services. In addition, more than 30 percent of the Next40 are equipped with Cloudflare’s Internet security, performance, and reliability solutions—such as Back Market, Happn, Wildmoka, and SendinBlue. We take pride in being relied on by these organizations and are eager to help more French companies grow.

Since the beginning of the year, the rise in remote work, cyber threats, and stress on online assets has generated an even greater need to provide secure, fast, and reliable Internet services. This goes for employees, customers, and partners—of any organization. As a result, this demand has never been so critical. We’re here to work with all types of customers. If you are a business, a public sector organisation, an NGO—or anyone that has cybersecurity, performance, or reliability challenges or questions—get in touch with us. We’d love to explore how we can help. If you are a system integrator, consulting company, MSP, and so on—let’s explore a partnership on how we may be able to help you accelerate your business.

If you are interested in joining Cloudflare and helping to build a more secure, fast, and reliable Internet—please explore our open positions and select Paris, France as the location. We are hiring talented people locally and globally, now building our initial team of Account Executives, Channel Managers, Business Development Representatives, Solution Engineers, Customer Success Managers, and more—to further serve our current customers and grow with more organizations in France.It is a great honour for me to be part of the Cloudflare family, to help build Cloudflare’s future in France, and help French organizations grow. Feel free to reach out to me at blecoeur@cloudflare.com

Image courtesy TeleGeography Submarine Cable Map

These things happen and that’s not a good thing. The cut was reported on the venerable BBC news website. For the telecom operators in Jersey (JT Global) this wasn’t good news. However looking at the traffic from Cloudflare’s point of view; we can see that while the cable cut removed the direct path from London to Jersey, it was replaced by the backup path from Paris to Jersey. The move was 100% under the control of the BGP routing protocol. It's a relief that there's a fallback for when these unpredictable events happen.

Here's a look at one network on the island.

The red traffic is being served from our London data center (the normal location for all Jersey traffic) and the blue traffic is coming from our Paris data center. The step could well be caused by either a delayed break in one of the cables or the careful rerouting of traffic by JT Global network engineers.

CC-BY-SA-3.0 Wikipedia Jersey Map

Cloudflare is still serving traffic cleanly into Jersey. We will continue to monitor the traffic and services into the island.

Source: TeleGeography

What better day than the 14th of July (Bastille Day) to announce the latest addition to our network in Marseille, France? Our data center in the southern city of Marseille is our 2nd in France, 12th in Europe and 36th globally.

Marseille, France’s second largest city following Paris, is home to 2 million Internet users across the surrounding metropolitan area. It also serves as another point of redundancy to our Paris data center, one of our most trafficked facilities in the whole of Europe.

However, the true importance of Marseille is not just redundancy or its size. Marseille’s southern location makes it a major Internet gateway for networks throughout the Mediterranean, including many African and Middle Eastern countries. This is reflected by the fact that a substantial number of undersea submarine cables carrying Internet traffic are routed through Marseille (7 to be exact, and for those fastidious followers of our blog).

Marseille: a key interconnection point for traffic throughout the Mediterranean

These undersea cables are the principal means by which many countries are able to access the rest of the Internet—that is to say, access all of the other global networks that make up this big interconnected network we refer to as the Internet. In the case of Algeria, this latest deployment has reduced by half the latency to the over 2 million Internet applications using CloudFlare. In other words, all web sites and applications behind CloudFlare are now 2x as fast to access in Algeria (and in many other countries) now that Marseille is online.

If you’ve followed our previous blog posts, you’ll know that peering—the act of interconnecting with other regional networks—is critical to the fast, secure and local delivery of Internet traffic. And Marseille is no different. We’re proud to be the most recent participant on FranceIX’s Marseille Internet exchange, through which we are now able to serve traffic to networks throughout the Mediterranean. However, many large ISPs in the region, including some in Morocco and Tunisia, are not yet participants. If you are a customer of one of these ISPs, please reach out and encourage them to join!

Finally, as a result of our Marseille deployment, France is now the second country in Europe (following Germany after our Düsseldorf deployment) to host multiple CloudFlare data centers. However, it won’t be the last! Hint Hint….

_— Joyeux 14 juillet de la part de toute l’équipe CloudFlare!

(Happy Bastille Day from the CloudFlare team! for all non-french speaking blog readers)_

As it turns out, it takes a lot of work to stop massive attacks and to help make the web faster. Over the past six months, our entire team has contributed in every way imaginable to more than double the capacity of our global network. Below is a behind-the-scenes look into how we keep our global network running.

Along the way we’ve encountered many surprises—some fun and some cringe worthy—that have taught us about our team, our data centers and overcoming challenges that occasionally seem beyond our control.

• San Jose, US (SJC): Our counsel, Ken, is great at pumpkin carving, and even better at standing up to protect the privacy rights of our users (including against Kanye West’s army of lawyers). What you may not have known is that he is happiest in the data center (not to mention our cabling was much prettier when he finished!).

  

  Ken, our counsel

• Los Angeles, US (LAX): Our engineers monitor our network around the clock. Occasionally this means juggling multiple tasks. During our most recent upgrade, Joshua (Systems Reliability Engineer & super dad) managed to snatch a moment to put his kids to bed while managing simultaneous upgrades in Los Angeles and Stockholm.

• Chicago, US (ORD): Just before our Chicago upgrade we learned that our carrier had misplaced a shipment of memory. Fortunately, Nitin (Special Projects) averted disaster and got the courier to radio the driver (it took some convincing!), find and grab our DIMMs, and get the install done in time. When most people think of Chicago they think of the ‘95-96 Chicago Bulls (arguably the greatest basketball team to step foot on this earth). When we think of Chicago, our minds turn to the bullwhip effect. We precisely plan every data center launch and upgrade throughout the entire supply chain—from cables to servers to shipping schedules—to control against situations where precautions amplify errors.

• Dallas, US (DFW): At CloudFlare, stamina is key. Trey (Solution Engineer) experienced this first hand. Despite working through the night on our Dallas upgrade, he still managed to catch a 6:30 AM flight the following morning to San Antonio, where he ran a workshop for our friends at Rackspace.

• Ashburn, US (IAD): An important customer meeting the following morning didn’t stop Matthew (CEO) and Trey (Solution Engineer) from working through the night to upgrade our Ashburn facility. Trey even realized he could use his toenail clippers to save time cutting zipties and keep the install moving.

Home is where the datacenter is

• Hong Kong, HK (HKG): After speaking at an Internet security conference in China, Joshua (Special Projects Lead) spent three consecutive nights upgrading our Seoul, Tokyo and Hong Kong data centers. In addition to the data center, he found airport lounges and taxis to be equally habitable.

• London, GB (LHR): CloudFlare’s first international office opened in London in 2013. Since then we’ve enlisted an amazing team of engineers to keep our network humming 24x7x365. On more than a few occasions, James (Systems Reliability Engineer), Marty (Support Engineer) and Simon (Support Engineer) have found a warm room full of servers in our London facility a comfort on a bitter winter night.

• Stockholm, SE (ARN): Simon (Support Engineer) managed to navigate to the local Kjell to pick up a few needed power adapters, and then braved the 1° C cold outside of our Stockholm data center for a bit longer than he would have liked while waiting for an access card.

• Miami, US (MIA): We take security seriously, and so do our data center partners. Justin (Systems Reliability Engineer) was at least a little intimidated to find guards armed with machine guns protecting the entrance of our Miami facility.

• Tokyo, JP (NRT): We love our data centers so much that we even name our conference rooms after them. As our San Francisco office expands (we’ve now knocked down two walls!), we’ve named the latest NRT.

New challenges

• Atlanta, US (ATL): Each of our racks around the world are fitted with high tech PDUs (power distribution units) that allow for remote monitoring and power cycling. This allows us to monitor our infrastructure in real-time, and react at a moment’s notice. When our colocation provider in Atlanta told us that our PDU wouldn’t fit, giving up wasn’t an option. Joshua (Special Projects Lead) proposed a rack extender to do the trick!

• Paris, FR (CDG): Imagine being told that equipment you had just shipped 5,000 miles across the globe was about to be sent right back. Jérôme (Network Engineer), one of our resident French speakers, saved the day and made sure our equipment stayed right where it belonged: working hard in support of one of our busiest datacenters. Merci Jérôme!

• Seattle, US (SEA): We install console servers with out-of-band, cellular Internet access in each of our data centers to remotely manage our infrastructure in the case our primary Internet connectivity is lost. While this makes it easier to address connectivity issues, installing the equipment itself can occasionally be more difficult. With a SIM card stubbornly lodged into our console server in Seattle, Jerome (Partner Engineer) used what he had available—namely, dental floss and a pair of forceps—to get the job done in a way that even MacGyver would approve.

• Seoul, KR (ICN): Korea ranks near the top of most challenging locations to import equipment into (right up there with Warsaw). Fortunately, having facilitated hundreds of shipments in dozens of countries, Nitin (Special Projects) was able to break through a two month logjam in which Incheon airport became a temporary home for some of our equipment. Among his other talents, Nitin can now hum the FedEx and DHL songs in nearly any language of your choice.

• Valparaíso, CL (SCL): Sometimes events are just out of one’s control. To launch our newest data center we had to wait through multiple customs strikes before equipment could arrive. Still, the show went on. Tom (Network Engineer) worked through Christmas to shave 170ms off of latency for our users in Latin America.

What’s in store for 2014, you ask? Over the next 12 months we will significantly expand our data center footprint, adding facilities in regions we currently lack coverage: Latin America, the Middle East, Africa, and parts of Asia. China is our second largest market, Brazil is our third: in 2014 we’ll be significantly expanding our network to better serve these customers.

If this sounds like fun, and if you enjoy a few surprises every once in a while, please consider joining us. We’re actively recruiting for someone passionate and talented to assist with our expansion.

It was croissants, brie, and crêpes around the CloudFlare office today as our Paris data center went live. Paris joins Amsterdam as CloudFlare's second European data center. Amsterdam has traditionally been our busiest data center. Paris will take a significant amount of this load away from Amsterdam and make performance across Europe faster.

We have two French nationals on our team -- Matthieu (our systemsengineer and CloudFlare's first employee) and Jocelyn (our intern) -- so getting Paris online has been particularly exciting for them.

But we're not done there in terms of delivering great service to all of Europe. We're adding a data center in Frankfurt in the next few weeks and working on bringing up a data center in London soon as well.