Twelve Years In, Cloudflare Looks Past the Uptime Problem
Cloudflare turns 12 this week. As it has every year since its launch in 2010, the company is marking the occasion with a series of product announcements — its annual "Birthday Week" gifts back to the Internet. Previous years brought Universal SSL, Cloudflare Workers, the Zero Markup Registrar, the Bandwidth Alliance, and R2, its zero-egress-fee object store that went GA last week. This year's focus, previewed in its annual Founders' Letter, differs from those that came before in one important way: the existential threat to the open Internet has moved.
The Year of Two Halves
According to co-founders Matthew Prince and Michelle Zatlyn, 2022 started with a sense of post-pandemic momentum. COVID rates were dropping, vaccines were rolling out, and Cloudflare was finally returning to in-person meetings. Internally, the company had survived the massive traffic surge of 2020–2021 and used that pressure to rebuild its architecture for long-term stability. "We both felt optimistic for the future," the letter states.
Then, on February 24, Russia invaded Ukraine. That event framed everything that followed. Cloudflare has no staff in the region, but many employees have family near the front lines, and the company watched in real time as Ukrainian Internet traffic patterns shifted to reflect the physical reality of bombing and mass displacement.
Almost simultaneously, Russia began tightening its domestic Internet controls. Historically, Russian citizens enjoyed largely unfettered online access. The new regime marked a dramatic turn — "the first time a country of any scale had tried to go from a generally open Internet to one that was fully censored," the letter notes.
Routing Around the Censors
Despite the war, the founders describe reasons for optimism. The Internet largely held: physical links were cut in Ukraine, Russian forces rerouted BGP in occupied territories, and cyber attacks hammered Ukrainian infrastructure, yet connectivity continued to flow. John Gilmore's old adage — "The Internet sees censorship as damage and routes around it" — proved apt.
Cloudflare's response was to provide free services to government, financial, media, and civil society targets under attack, and to route traffic through every possible path both into and out of Ukraine. In Russia, the company's 1.1.1.1 app became a tool for ordinary citizens seeking uncensored news. The founders estimate roughly 5% of Russian households now use it to reach the open Internet, and that number is still growing. The Kremlin sanctioned Prince for the effort; the company took it as a good sign.
A Turning Point for Connectivity
The war is not an isolated incident. Cloudflare says 2022 has seen more countries shut down Internet access than any prior year, and it draws a distinction between the old justifications — such as exam cheaters — and the new reality of political repression. As the letter was written, Iran was attempting to silence protests through broad censorship, a move the founders describe as an unacceptable departure from the status quo, not business as usual.
The founders warn that these pressures extend even to Western democracies, citing a spike in court-ordered infrastructure-level blocking that results in massive overblocking of unrelated content. A single court, the argument goes, could effectively impose its local values on a global network. "If these precedents are upheld then the Internet risks falling to the lowest common denominator of what's globally acceptable," the letter says.
From Walled Gardens to the Empire
Cloudflare's founding threat was not a CDN competitor, the founders recall. Nor was it Cisco, whose networking hardware they view as an inevitability to be replaced by scalable services. The real threat, then and now, is walled gardens. In 2010, the high cost of staying online — spam, DDoS, performance issues — pushed organizations toward a safe harbor on Facebook. The risk was that Facebook became the Internet, and getting online required the gatekeeper's permission.
The analogy the founders draw is to Shopify versus Amazon: while Shopify arms small merchants with the tools to compete against the retail giant, Cloudflare sees itself providing the essentials for the permissionless innovation of the web. "Shopify is to Amazon.com as Cloudflare is to Facebook," the letter reads.
And then there's the Star Wars arc. The early Internet was Episode IV — a new hope. Programmers and network engineers were the Jedi, and the Force was the open network itself. But now the Empire, in the form of old centers of control, has struck back and "discovered the rebel base on Hoth." The hard work ahead, per the founders, is in rebuilding Internet protocols to be secure and private by design, and in negotiating the tension between local law and a network that is inherently global.
What Comes Next
The practical response is a familiar one: innovation weeks for products and revenue; birthday weeks for what the founders consider gifts to the Internet. This year's announcements, they say, will include lower-cost security tools aimed at an increasingly mobile world, more developer resources for the next generation of applications, and privacy-preserving alternatives to commonly used services. The broader mission — emphasizing that 20% of the web and 30% of the Fortune 1,000 now sit behind Cloudflare — remains fixing the fundamentals rather than monetizing the relationship.
The letter closes with acknowledgment of uncertain economic conditions and a reaffirmation of intent: "we're just getting started."
