Okoro, this is the 25th website you're building, and you don't care to know what, why, and how Cloudflare actually works?
Wooo. Dishonor on you.
Well, on a serious note, this is the topic of the day.
Two. Three. Four.
Let's Qwiikly get started.
The Internet's Backbone
Sometime around November 2025, ChatGPT, X, Spotify, Canva, Zoom, League of Legends (literally half of the internet) went down.
But how so unanimously?
Cloudflare is your answer.
Cloudflare powers 20% of websites (really big ones).
The likes of Netflix, Discord, Shopify, Visa, etc. In numbers, this is around 200–250 million websites.
For this reason, it's very crucial and… delicate.
Every request, response, and change cascades down to these ~200 million websites.
If that means going down, so be it.
Their Love Is Unconditional
On November 18th, 2025, Cloudflare went down.
There was another outage 17 days later, in the midst of the festive season.
By February 2026, it had partially gone down again for some users.
And if we go by history lessons, I'd also mention June 21, 2022; June 24, 2019; July 17, 2020; April 14–15, 2020; etc.
History repeats itself, they say.
But here's the question you've all been tapping your feet to ask…
Why the strong affinity to this company? Aren't there competitors? Is it so vital? Is it worth it?
The Game-Changing Technology
Imagine you have a popular African delicacy (say, "Egusi Soup") that you loved during a visit to Nigeria.
You loved this soup so much that when you returned to your country, you still wanted to eat it and considered importing it.
Assuming the soup doesn't spoil, it would cost an arm, a leg, and most importantlym time to get it to your country.
But there could be one way to solve this problem.
Request that the Nigerian restaurant open a branch in your country.
Let's assume they honor this.
They get to your country, but their food tastes so good that they start receiving a ton of orders from different corners, precincts, and states.
Eventually, just like before, it may cost an arm, a leg, and most importantly, time to fulfill orders.
Well, not if they use Cloudflare.
What Cloudflare Does
Cloudflare is primarily a middleman in the web services industry.
Cloudflare's mission is to help build a better internet by providing the infrastructure that makes businesses online fast, reliable, and secure.
Here's what that means.
In our previous analogy, the first difference that employing Cloudflare would make **is this:
Cloudflare sets up a distribution system across countries. **
Across pivotal locations, it builds storefronts that equally disperse demand pressure.
The closer each location is to you, the faster you get your tasty Egusi Soup.
Cloudflare CDN
The feature that does this is the Cloudflare CDN.
Instead of a website keeping its files in one single location, Cloudflare stores copies of those files (videos, music, images) on thousands of servers worldwide.
- Speed: When you click a link, Cloudflare pulls the data from the closest and most convenient server to you, making load times significantly faster.
- Redundancy: If one server goes down, there are thousands of others ready to take its place.
DDoS Protection & Encryption
Cloudflare mitigated 20.5 million DDoS attacks in Q1 2025 alone (358% YoY increase)
In Q3 2025, Cloudflare blocked 8.3 million attacks (3,780/hour or ~1/second), up 15% QoQ and 40% YoY.
Cloudflare loves to set out patrols across locations to prevent abuse of services, neutralize fabricated excessive demands, and filter out bad customers.
DNS
In keeping with its commitments to speed, reliability, and security, Cloudflare also offers a DNS service.
Before you can visit a site like google.com, your computer needs to know its "address."
This is called DNS (Domain Name System), and it functions like a phone book.
So just like matching names to phone numbers, DNS matches web names to numerical IP addresses.
Cloudflare provides one of the fastest and most reliable DNS services in the world — often known by the address 1.1.1.1.
Now, the question I'll leave with you all is: why aren't there more competitors?
And that is a wrap.
Btw, I'm a solo developer who's a free agent currently — openly looking for software engineering roles. My portfolio is at www.me.soapnotes.doctor.
Thank you so much!
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