Fifteen Years In, Birthday Week 2025 Sets the Tone for the Next Era
Cloudflare marked its fifteenth anniversary this year with a Birthday Week focused on what the Internet needs next: sustainable content monetization, stronger community building, and the usual push for broader access, speed, and security. The company’s annual founder’s letter framed the milestone in terms of the Internet’s evolution—from pushing encryption adoption from 10% to 95% of traffic to tackling modern content distribution challenges.
The week was packed with new products and capabilities. Here’s a recap of the announcements, day by day.
Monetization and New Revenue Models
| What | In a sentence … |
|---|---|
| Cloudflare just got faster and more secure, powered by Rust | We have re-engineered our core proxy with a new modular, Rust-based architecture, cutting median response time by 10ms for millions. |
| Introducing Observatory and Smart Shield | New monitoring tools in the Cloudflare dashboard that provide actionable recommendations and one-click fixes for performance issues. |
| Monitoring AS-SETs and why they matter | Cloudflare Radar now includes Internet Routing Registry (IRR) data, allowing network operators to monitor AS-SETs to help prevent route leaks. |
| An AI Index for all our customers | We announced the private beta of AI Index, a new service that creates an AI-optimized search index for your domain that you control and can monetize. |
| Introducing new regional Internet traffic and Certificate Transparency insights on Cloudflare Radar | Sub-national traffic insights and Certificate Transparency dashboards for TLS monitoring. |
| Eliminating Cold Starts 2: shard and conquer | We have reduced Workers cold starts by 10x by implementing a new "worker sharding" system that routes requests to already-loaded Workers. |
| Network performance update: Birthday Week 2025 | The TCP Connection Time (Trimean) graph shows that we are the fastest TCP connection time in 40% of measured ISPs – and the fastest across the top networks. |
| How Cloudflare uses performance data to make the world’s fastest global network even faster | We are using our network's vast performance data to tune congestion control algorithms, improving speeds by an average of 10% for QUIC traffic. |
| Code Mode: the better way to use MCP | It turns out we've all been using MCP wrong. Most agents today use MCP by exposing the "tools" directly to the LLM. We tried something different: Convert the MCP tools into a TypeScript API, and then ask an LLM to write code that calls that API. The results are striking. |
Supporting the Builders Community
This year’s Birthday Week went beyond infrastructure, with a heavy emphasis on the people building on top of it. The most notable initiatives include:
- Workers Launchpad Cohort #6: Another group of early-stage startups joins Cloudflare’s accelerator program for scaling resources.
- New physical startup hubs: Cloudflare is opening dedicated spaces for startups in its San Francisco, Austin, London, and Lisbon offices, offering mentorship and community.
- Free developer platform for students: All students now get free access to Cloudflare’s developer tools for learning and experimentation.
- 1,111 internships in 2026: A record commitment to bringing classroom talent into the industry.
- Free tools for non-profits: Public-interest organizations get access to production-grade developer tools at no cost.
The message is clear: whether you’re a founder, a student, or a mission-driven team, Cloudflare wants you building on its platform.
Beyond the Announcements
The week’s releases were covered in detail across dozens of blog posts, and a full conversation about the launches is available on ThisWeekinNET.com.
As Cloudflare closes out its fifteenth year, the focus remains on preparing the Internet for what’s next—not just solving today’s problems, but making sure the next generation of builders has the tools and support to solve tomorrow’s.
