How much of the internet actually runs on Cloudflare?
S&T – IT
23 NOVEMBER 2025
- When major online services suddenly went dark due to an outage at Cloudflare, it exposed how deeply intertwined so much of the web is with a single infrastructure provider.
- The outage itself stemmed from a largely technical but crucial aspect of the company’s infrastructure, its bot management feature.
- Cloudflare’s systems support a wide swath of internet traffic, and a breakdown on its network reverberated globally. But
- Cloudflare’s own public data shows that its global network comprises hundreds of data centres across more than 100 countries, allowing it to process traffic at the “edge” — that means close to users rather than routing all requests back to origin servers.
- The company serves on average 81 million HTTP requests per second across its network.
- Independent usage-tracking sites report that Cloudflare is used by roughly 20.4% of all websites worldwide as a reverse proxy.
- A reverse proxy is like a middleman between a client and a server that triages client requests.
- Publicly available lists of companies and domains relying on Cloudflare include names like LinkedIn, X, Vimeo, PayPal, Shopify, ChatGPT, and Discord.
