When major online services suddenly went dark earlier this week 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 just how big is Cloudflare’s footprint on the internet, and what does “running on Cloudflare” really mean for websites, enterprises, and users?
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. An HTTP request is a query by a client, like a web browser, to a server, like in this case Cloudflare.
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.
With a fifth of all websites using Cloudflare, the infrastructure provider is at the top of the reverse proxy category. And among websites that employ some reverse proxy service or content-delivery network (CDN), Cloudflare’s penetration is even more pronounced with over 81% of those sites.
Publicly available lists of companies and domains relying on Cloudflare include names like LinkedIn, X (former Twitter), Vimeo, PayPal, Shopify, ChatGPT, and Discord. This demonstrates that its user base spans high-traffic enterprise platforms as well as smaller web properties. In India, names like Titan, Air India and HDFC rely on the infrastructure provider
Cloudflare’s own analytics and reporting materials indicate that approximately 25 million distinct Internet properties rely on its network. The company notes that its service reaches more than 200 cities globally, facilitating coverage near users’ locations rather than relying on centralised routing.
The dominance of Cloudflare in this space carries both power and risk. The scale of its adoption means that when service disruption occurs, the impact can be broad, affecting not just niche sites, but widely used applications and services.
The outage this week illustrates how much the platforms dependent on Cloudflare’s network. The usage statistics suggest that “running on Cloudflare” is not an exclusive characteristic reserved for giant, high-traffic firms. The large subset of web properties using Cloudflare spans many tiers of traffic volume, meaning that the company’s engineering decisions and failure modes have ripple effects across the entire spectrum of the web, from niche blogs to global enterprises.
Research in internet infrastructure and dependency further underscores the fragility inherent in centralisation. Academic studies have documented that a relatively small number of third-party CDNs, DNS, and hosting services provide critical infrastructure for a large share of popular domains globally.
These trends create a dynamic where a failure or misconfiguration at a key provider like Cloudflare may propagate widely.
While “running on Cloudflare” does not literally mean every web request anywhere relies on its systems, the coverage is significant enough to make the company a backbone for large swathes of online services.
The sheer number of websites under its reverse proxy, the global scale of its data centres, and the presence of major enterprise platforms among its customers all contribute to a scenario where the company’s stability and engineering robustness are crucial to the functioning of the modern internet.
Published – November 21, 2025 08:01 am IST