Cloudflare, Inc. is an American web-infrastructure and website-security company, providing content-delivery-network services, DDoS mitigation, Internet security, and distributed domain-name-server services. Cloudflare's services sit between a website's visitor and the Cloudflare user's hosting provider, acting as a reverse proxy for websites. Cloudflare's headquarters are in San Francisco. History Cloudflare was created in 2009 by Matthew Prince, Lee Holloway, and Michelle Zatlyn. It received media attention in June 2011 for providing security services to the website of LulzSec, a black hat hacking group. Cloudflare acts as a reverse proxy for web traffic. Cloudflare supports web protocols, including SPDY and HTTP/2. In addition to this, Cloudflare offers support for HTTP/2 Server Push. From 2009, the company was venture-capital funded. On August 15, 2019, Cloudflare submitted its S-1 filing for IPO on the New York Stock Exchange under the stock ticker NET. It opened for public trading on September 13, 2019, priced at $15 per share. In February 2014, Cloudflare mitigated what was at the time the largest ever recorded DDoS attack, which peaked at 400 Gigabits per second against an undisclosed customer. In November 2014, Cloudflare reported another massive DDoS attack with independent media sites being targeted at 500 Gbit/s. In March 2013, the company defended The Spamhaus Project from a DDoS attack that exceeded 300 Gbit/s. Akamai's chief architect stated that at the time it was "the largest publicly announced DDoS attack in the history of the Internet". Cloudflare has also reportedly absorbed attacks that have peaked over 400Gbit/s from an NTP Reflection attack. In 2014, Cloudflare introduced an effort called Project Galileo in response to cyberattacks against vulnerable online targets, such as artists, activists, journalists, and human rights groups. Project Galileo provides such groups with free services to protect their websites. In 2019, Cloudflare announced that 600 users and organizations were participating in the project. On April 1, 2019, Cloudflare announced a new freemium Virtual Private Network service named WARP. The service would initially be available through the 1.1.1.1 mobile apps with a desktop app available later. On September 25, 2019, Cloudflare released WARP to the public. The beta for macOS and Windows was announced on April 1, 2020. Products DDoS Protection Cloudflare provides DDoS mitigation services which protect customers from distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks. As of September 2020, the company claims to block "an average of 72 billion threats per day, including some of the largest DDoS attacks in history." On September 6, 2019, Wikipedia became the victim of a DDoS attack. European users were unable to access Wikipedia for several hours. The attack was mitigated after Wikimedia network engineers used Cloudflare's network and DDoS protection services to re-route and filter internet traffic. The specific Cloudflare product used was Magic Transit. Content Distribution Network Cloudflare offers a popular Content Distribution Network (CDN) service. The company launched in 2010 and TechCrunch wrote that their goal was to be "a CDN for the masses." Ten years later, the company claimed to support over 25 million internet websites. Controversies Cloudflare has faced several controversies over its unwillingness to monitor content distributed via its network—a stance it has defended based on the principle of free speech. Cloudflare stated that it will "continue to abide by the law" and "serve all customers", further explaining "our proper role is not that of Internet censor". These controversies have involved Cloudflare's policy of content neutrality and subsequent usage of its services by numerous contentious websites, including The Daily Stormer and 8chan, an imageboard which has been linked to multiple mass shootings in the United States and the Christchurch mosque shootings in New Zealand. Under public pressure, Cloudflare terminated services to The Daily Stormer in 2017 and to 8chan fo
