Press Release
Cloudflare Publishes Its First Annual Impact Report
Report covers a year of new offerings, partnerships, and commitments to help build a more sustainable Internet
December 17, 2021
SAN FRANCISCO – Cloudflare, Inc. (NYSE: NET), the security, performance, and reliability company helping to build a better Internet, today published its first annual Impact Report showcasing its commitment to helping build a better Internet that is principled, accessible for everyone, and sustainable. In 2021, Cloudflare began publicly reporting information about its environment, social and governance (ESG) impacts. The company focused on crafting a blueprint for a zero-emissions Internet, improving efficiencies of its global network that already runs on 100 percent renewable energy, and launching new tools to help other businesses build sustainability into their applications. Further, the report documents the company’s initiatives to be a force for good by protecting vulnerable groups from cyberattack, providing free Internet connection services to underserved communities, and helping vaccine distributors meet the high demand for appointments worldwide.
“Our mission is to help build a better Internet. Throughout the pandemic, it’s become abundantly clear that we all have a responsibility to help where we can. That’s why we have been using Cloudflare’s infrastructure, one of the largest networks in the world, to bring these efforts front and center,” said Matthew Prince, co-founder and CEO of Cloudflare. “It is our belief that everyone should have access to reliable, secure, and sustainable Internet. And we’re here to do our part to make that happen.”
Highlights of the 2021 Cloudflare Impact Report include how the company is:
Helping make the Internet more efficient
The fastest way to reduce the Internet’s greenhouse gas emissions is to use less energy. The Cloudflare network was fundamentally engineered to be more efficient at every level: distributed design, hardware, protocols, systems, and services. Alongside running on 100 percent renewable energy, Cloudflare committed in 2021 to remove by 2025 all historical carbon its global network has emitted since its founding. It also deployed new Arm® NeoverseTM-based processors to improve the efficiency of how it serves Internet requests at the edge by more than 50 percent. Overall, the Cloudflare global network is now securely processing 10X as many Internet requests for every watt consumed as it did in 2013.
Beyond its own network, Cloudflare is helping its customers build sustainability into their own applications. Now businesses can choose to intelligently route traffic through data centers powered by renewable energy using Green Compute on Cloudflare Workers. Customers can also understand and quantify their individual footprints and approximate savings from Cloudflare’s network in comparison to Internet averages with the Carbon Impact Report. Furthermore, organizations that deploy websites on Cloudflare Pages will automatically operate on renewable energy and receive a green certification from The Green Web Foundation displayed through a verified badge.
Supporting more than 100 organizations in 10 countries to schedule approximately 100 million vaccinations through Project Fair Shot
In February 2021, Cloudflare launched Project Fair Shot to provide free access to its Waiting Room service to any government, hospital, pharmacy, or organization that is helping distribute COVID-19 vaccines. By relying on Cloudflare’s global infrastructure, Project Fair Shot can scale regardless of demand without requiring organizations to dedicate limited IT resources to code changes.
Protecting 1,600 civil society organizations from an average of 53 million cyber threats per day
Founded in 2014, Cloudflare’s Project Galileo provides free cybersecurity protection to qualified public interest groups like artists, advocates, humanitarian organizations, and the voices of political dissent that face cyber threats in disproportionate numbers. Cloudflare blocked 53 million cyber threats per day on average, and in 2021 alone the number of organizations participating increased more than 50%. During the pandemic, Cloudflare also began offering its Cloudflare for Teams product to help these organizations quickly and securely transition to remote work to ensure their operations and work in promoting human rights, journalism, and community-based activities.
Providing civil society organizations with new tools to monitor Internet shutdowns
In 2021, Cloudflare announced a new program to help its Project Galileo civil society partners track and document Internet shutdowns and protect democratic elections around the world from cyberattacks. Radar Alerts alert civil society organizations when Cloudflare has detected significant drops in traffic, typically associated with an Internet shutdown, with the hope that the information is used to document, track, and help hold institutions accountable for these human rights violations.
Helping more communities access the Internet through Project Pangea
Launched in July 2021, Project Pangea provides free connection services to the Internet for rural, nonprofit, and local community networks—particularly in underserved areas. Cloudflare can help communities solve the network challenges of routing traffic to and from the Internet on behalf of the local or community network, while also providing state-of-the-art security, privacy, and performance.
Cloudflare is a signatory of the UN Global Compact, and is committed to the UN Ten Principles. To read the Cloudflare 2021 Sustainability Report, click here. For more in-depth information about the company’s commitment to be a force for good and an engine of global sustainability, please visit cloudflare.com/impact.
About Cloudflare
Cloudflare, Inc. (www.cloudflare.com / @cloudflare) is on a mission to help build a better Internet. Cloudflare’s suite of products protect and accelerate any Internet application online without adding hardware, installing software, or changing a line of code. Internet properties powered by Cloudflare have all web traffic routed through its intelligent global network, which gets smarter with every request. As a result, they see significant improvement in performance and a decrease in spam and other attacks. Cloudflare was named to Entrepreneur Magazine’s Top Company Cultures 2018 list and ranked among the World’s Most Innovative Companies by Fast Company in 2019. Headquartered in San Francisco, CA, Cloudflare has offices in Austin, TX, Champaign, IL, New York, NY, San Jose, CA, Seattle, WA, Washington, D.C., Toronto, Lisbon, London, Munich, Paris, Beijing, Singapore, Sydney, and Tokyo.
