Cloudflare, Inc. is an American technology company headquartered in San Francisco, California. It sells a reverse proxy service that sits between website visitors and a site's hosting provider, with DNS and security services added to that service.
History of Cloudflare
Creator: Matthew Prince, Lee Holloway and Michelle Zatlyn, co-founders. Year: 2009.
Cloudflare was founded on 26 July 2009. Matthew Prince, Lee Holloway and Michelle Zatlyn started it. Prince and Holloway had worked together before. They worked on Project Honey Pot. Unspam Technologies made it. That partly inspired Cloudflare.
It first considered the name WebWall. It chose Cloudflare. It said the name fit a firewall in the cloud better. A firewall is a network security device. It filters traffic between networks. In 2020, co-founder Michelle Zatlyn became president. She also served as chief operating officer.
On 15 August 2019, it filed an S-1 registration statement. It planned to list its shares on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker NET. Shares began public trading on 13 September 2019 at 15 dollars each. Wikipedia lists its headquarters as San Francisco, California.
From 2014, it offered free protection. It covered distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks. The protection went to artists, activists, journalists and human rights groups. It ran this through Project Galileo. In 2017, it extended the service. It covered electoral infrastructure and political campaigns. It used the name Athenian Project. A DDoS attack floods a site with traffic from many sources. That takes the site offline.
It bought several companies over time. Wikipedia lists acquisitions. They run from StopTheHacker in February 2014 to Human Native in January 2026. Cloudflare agreed to buy Replicate in November 2025. Zaraz was announced in December 2021. The AI purchases added tools. They manage AI bots and scrapers.
The services work as a reverse proxy. It sits between visitors and the hosting provider. That improves speed and blocks malicious traffic. It also runs a content delivery network (CDN). It runs the Workers platform for code at the network edge. It runs the 1.1.1.1 public DNS resolver. It also runs the WARP service. W3Techs reports that Cloudflare was used by 26.9 percent of all websites in October 2026.
Changelog and latest update
Product changes are posted in its developer changelog. Each entry has a date, a product group and a short description. The changelog lists each change to a Cloudflare product by date.
Wikipedia lists how the services grew after the 2019 listing. It added edge computing through the Workers platform. It added a public DNS resolver at 1.1.1.1. Later additions include AI tools for bot management. They also include the acquisitions of Replicate and Human Native.
The October 2026 changelog covers the API Shield product group. It also covers the Cloudflare API MCP server. The API MCP server entry is dated 10 October 2026. It says the server now serves Cloudflare skills to agents. The changelog lists each entry with its date. Readers can see the order of changes.
Latest update: API Shield on-demand schema learning, 2026-10-12
The changelog dates this entry 12 October 2026. API Shield users can now start a schema learning run. They no longer wait for the weekly schedule. The user opens the operations table for a zone. The user selects Ad-hoc learn schema, then selects Run learning. The run covers the entire zone and uses observed traffic. The existing learning thresholds still apply. The dialog shows the learning status and the last completed run.
Usage examples
Cloudflare services are managed in the dashboard and through an API at api.cloudflare.com. The examples below list DNS records through the API, query the 1.1.1.1 resolver over HTTPS, write a Worker in JavaScript and deploy it with the Wrangler command line tool. The first two examples use placeholder values that the account owner replaces.
API=https://api.cloudflare.com/client/v4
curl -s "$API/zones/$ZONE/dns_records" \
-H "Authorization: Bearer $TOKEN"This request asks the Cloudflare API for the DNS records of one zone. The ZONE variable holds the zone identifier, and the TOKEN variable holds an API token with read access to DNS. The response is a JSON list of the records.
H='accept: application/dns-json'
Q=https://1.1.1.1/dns-query
curl -s -H "$H" "$Q?name=ex.com&type=A"The Cloudflare 1.1.1.1 resolver answers DNS queries over HTTPS when the request sends the dns-json accept header. This query asks for the IPv4 address record of ex.com and returns the answer in JSON format.
export default {
async fetch(request) {
return new Response(
'Hello from the edge');
},
};A Cloudflare Worker is a small JavaScript program that runs on the Cloudflare network. The fetch function receives each web request and returns a response. This Worker returns a short text message for every request.
npm install -g wrangler
wrangler login
wrangler deployWrangler is the command line tool that Cloudflare provides for Workers. The login command opens a browser sign-in step. The deploy command uploads the Worker code from the project folder to the Cloudflare network.
References
These sources are outside Websnoogie and were checked on 2026-10-12.
Cloudflare
Wikipedia
Encyclopedia article on Cloudflare. It covers the 2009 founding, the 2019 stock listing, the acquisitions by year, the Workers platform, the 1.1.1.1 resolver and the company's services as a reverse proxy.
Cloudflare Home Page
Cloudflare, Inc.
The official home page of the company. It lists the products for application security, performance, developers and networking, and it links to the sign-up pages for the Cloudflare dashboard.
Cloudflare Press Center
Cloudflare, Inc.
The official press page with company news, press releases and media contacts. It is the place where the company publishes its announcements about acquisitions and financial results.
Cloudflare Developer Changelog
Cloudflare, Inc.
The official changelog for all Cloudflare products, with dated entries. The entry on API Shield schema learning, dated 12 October 2026, is the latest update used on this page.
Cloudflare Blog
Cloudflare, Inc.
The official engineering and product blog of Cloudflare. It publishes articles about the network, the security services, the DNS resolver and the technical design of the company's systems.
1.1.1.1 Public DNS Resolver Documentation
Cloudflare, Inc.
The official documentation for the 1.1.1.1 public DNS resolver. It describes the DNS over HTTPS and DNS over TLS services and the setup steps for devices and networks.
Cloudflare Developer Fundamentals
Cloudflare, Inc.
The official guide to the basic concepts of the Cloudflare platform, including accounts, zones, DNS records and API tokens. It explains the terms used in the API examples on this page.
When your DNS points the wrong way
When DNS is wrong, visitors see an error or an old page. Email can stop arriving. A DNS record is a short line that tells the internet where your domain lives. Cloudflare manages many of those lines for websites. If a record is missing or points to an old host, some visitors reach your site while others do not. We check the records before and after any change.
We bring 20+ years of web design experience to DNS work. Before a change, we write down the current records. After the change, we test the site and the mail from more than one place. If a record looks wrong, we stop and ask you first.
We answer the phone any day, 7 am to 10 pm. Call 402-813-4034 when a site is down or when a change is due. We answer the question and tell you what we see. If the fix needs more work, we explain the cost first. A new site built by us starts at $300, paid once.
Tell us your domain, your current host and what stopped working. We will reply with the likely cause and the next step. Or pick the $300 website below if you need a new build with DNS set up correctly from the start.
