Cloudflare

History

2022

Technical Domain Operator.GOV

The common top-level domain.GOV, which is the official US government domain, is going through an era of change. In March 2021, the national agency for cybersecurity and infrastructure security of the United States (CISA) became the registry of the domain zone, replacing the US General Services Administration in this capacity. A month later, CISA made registering domain names in the.GOV zone free - previously costing $400 a year. This was announced on January 18, 2023 by the Coordination Center for the National Domain of the Internet (CC).

The next changes were reported by the Domain Incite resource. Cloudflare became the technical operator of the domain zone, which signed a corresponding contract with CISA in the amount of $7.2 million in mid-December 2022^[1] the US^[2] Cloudflare provides services, CDN protection from and DDoS-attacks. servers DNS She is accredited ICANN as a domain registrar, but has not previously been involved in the domain business directly. Its approval as a technical domain operator.GOV is a serious claim that the situation may change in the near future.

Cloudflare, with its powerful infrastructure, is quite capable of squeezing out many domain market players. And choosing a.GOV domain zone as a "launch pad" looks optimal. On the one hand, very few names are registered in the domain - as of January 2023, about 8,600. On the other hand, the image advantages of managing the US government domain are absolutely obvious.

Previously, the functions of the technical operator of the.GOV domain were performed by VeriSign. According to Domain Incite, a tender for the right to technical management of the domain zone was announced by CISA in August 2022. There is no information on whether Verisign participated in it for January 2023. This is the second domain with which the company has lost its work in recent years: in 2022, Verisign simply did not participate in the tender for the right to be the technical operator of the national domain of Tuvalu.TV, which it managed for many years (as a result, GoDaddy became the technical operator of the domain zone). However, Verisign shareholders are unlikely to have cause for concern: while the company remains the registrar of the.COM domain, they have nothing to worry^[3]

There was a crash that affected many popular sites and services around the world

June 21, 2022 recorded a global failure on the Internet. It occurred due to problems with Cloudflare, deals with CDN services, protection against, DDoS-attacks provides secure access to resources and servers. DNS

Cloudflare ensures the operation of various sites and services on the Internet through various technologies. According to to data the Downdetector portal, outages affected a number of sites, including Discord Shopify, Grindr, Fitbit and. Peleton The failure also affected the operation of the food delivery service, DoorDash the Omegle online communication service and the entertainment site. Crunchyroll In addition, Zerodha, Medium.com, Register, Grow, Buffer, iSPIRT, Upstox and Social Blade are intermittently working. Due to the failure of web servers, the League of Legends video game was temporarily unavailable, as well as many sites, including the Feedly news aggregator, the NordVPN VPN service, and the exchange. cryptocurrencies Coinbase

Cloudflare crashed, which "put" many popular sites and services around the world

Most of the problems arose for users of their own DNS search service Cloudflare. Several Verge employees found that during the outage, users were unable to access any website as a result of using the Cloudflare 1.1.1.1 DNS service. Users encountered errors or timeouts while accessing the Cloudflare network or services. Reports of problems began at about 10:00 am Moscow time. Cloudflare reported that it fixed the problem at 14:14 Moscow time.

According to The Verge, Cloudflare emphasizes that the current problem is not global, although it affects many regions. The company has already carried out the necessary restoration work and is monitoring services. Cloudflare does not name the causes of the problem as a provider of solutions for protecting against DDoS attacks. The company had a similar failure in early June 2022, but then the failure was local and only affected India.^[4]

Continued work in the Russian Federation

The American cloud provider Cloudflare does not intend to stop working in the Russian Federation. This was stated by the head of the company Matthew Prince in the organization's blog, which became known on March 8, 2022.

Cloudflare also said it had moved customer encryption keys from its data centers in Ukraine, Russia and Belarus.

Cloudfare is abiding by the sanctions imposed with a "robust and comprehensive program," he said. Over the past few weeks, users from Russia have begun to use Cloudflare services more often, and to visit more sites of the world media, access to which is blocked in Russia.

We have closed paid access to our network and systems in regions that have come under comprehensive sanctions. We have also stopped working with clients that we believe are linked to sanctions, including clients linked to Russian financial institutions, influence campaigns, and Russia-linked governments in Donetsk and Lugansk.

Cloudflare, a web infrastructure security company, provided its services free of charge to the Ukrainian government, telecommunications companies and any Ukrainian organization facing an attack.

The company said it was critical that it continued to operate and provide critical information to its citizens and the rest of the world about what was happening to them. The company considers the complete closure of access to Cloudflare services to be a mistake. The departure of Cloudflare would hardly harm the Russian government, but it would make it difficult for Russians to access the world Internet and make them vulnerable to the authorities.

The head of Cloudflare Matthew Prince said that the company will not restrict Russians and leave the Russian market. He explained this by the fact that "Russia needs more, not less access to the world Internet." In other words, the Prince wants to preserve access to international sources of information for Russians^[5].

Acquisition of Area 1 Security for $162 million

Cloudflare, a provider of CDN services, DDoS protection and secure access to resources, has announced the acquisition of email protection manufacturer Area 1 Security. This became known on February 23, 2022. The transaction amount amounted to approximately $162 million. Its official closure is scheduled for the second quarter of 2022. Read more here.

2021: Purchase of Zaraz Website Acceleration Software Developer

In December 2021, the American company Cloudflare announced the purchase of Zaraz, but did not disclose the cost and other terms of the transaction. The sale of Zaraz marks the exit from the capital of the startup of the Russian fund Cabra VC. Read more here.

2020: Leaked database with 3m real IP addresses

On July 27, 2020, it became known that Darknet flowed away database CloudFlare has 3 million real IP addresses.

The data leak was reported by the National Security and Defense Council of Ukraine.

Specialists of the National Coordination Center for Cybersecurity (NCCC) under the NSDC have identified the real addresses of 3 million sites using the CloudFlare service. The list also contains 45 websites registered on the gov.ua domain used by Ukrainian authorities and sites of critical infrastructure facilities.

According to NKCC specialists, some leaked data are outdated, but the database also contains up-to-date information.

Resource owners are urged to change IP addresses and strengthen monitoring of cyber attacks on these^[6] IP addresses to^[7].

2019: Going public: Shares rise 20%, capitalisation $5.3 billion

On September 13, 2019, Cloudflare became a public company, entering the New York Stock Exchange, on which it was assigned the ticker symbol NET.

As part of the IPO, 35 million shares were sold at a price of $15 apiece, as a result of which Cloudflare managed to raise $525 million. Initially, the company set the placement range at $10-12, and the day before the listing raised it to $12-14.

After the start of trading, the company's quotation rate increased by 21.6% relative to the IPO level, and a few hours later the securities began to cost $18.24. By the close of the exchange, the value of one Cloudflare share amounted to $18 and the market capitalization reached $5.3 billion. At preliminary trading at 16:30 Moscow time on September 16, 2019, the shares rose in price by 4%, to $18.55.

CEO Matthew Prince and other Cloudflare executives attend the company's stock offering ceremony on the New York Stock Exchange

About 35 million Class A shares were allocated for the IPO. In addition, underwriters Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and JPMorgan Chase received an option to buy an additional 5.25 million securities. The offer is expected to close on September 17, 2019, with Class A shares receiving one vote each. Prior to going public, Cloudflare raised a total of $525 million in investments.

In an interview with CNBC, Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince said that the decision on the IPO was made after it became clear that this step was advisable, taking into account the volume of the company's business.

When a company reaches a certain reach and size... you become obliged to your employees and investors to make the company public if possible, "he said.

Prior to the IPO, Cloudflare reported violating U.S. sanctions laws because it provided services to banned organizations and government agencies.

By mid-September 2019, the company's platform supports approximately 10% of the world's 1 million largest sites and more than 20 million Internet resources overall, processing trillions of requests each month. Most Cloudflare users prefer free features, but the company has a growing number of paying customers (among them - 10% of the Fortune 1000 list).^[8]

Notes