The internet's landlord is cutting staff

If you’ve got a website, there’s a high chance that it’s served through Cloudflare. They’re a CDN: Content Distribution Network – speeding up your site by copying your content to points around the globe closer to visitors. They also do DNS: Domain Name System – telling browsers where your site is. And DDoS protection: Distributed Denial of Service protection - keeping your site from crashing when someone tries to flood it with traffic.

It’s a useful service, about 20% of all websites in the world use it, particularly because it has a free tier that many people take advantage of. This makes them one of those invisible chokepoints we only notice when things go wrong.

Last December, Cloudflare had a massive, multi-hour, outage that took down close to a third of all traffic it served. This was an internal configuration error, not some kind of attack. I spent hours trying to help clients get back online that day, mostly unsuccessfully.

Then last week they announced they were firing about 20% of their workforce (1100 people). All of this while reporting record revenue up 34% year-on-year.

The official “reason”? AI is making those jobs unnecessary. They’re also hiring over a thousand interns at the same time, make of that what you will.

Who knows? Maybe AI really is making them more efficient. But maybe this is just what happens when a company puts margins above resilience. Whatever the reason, it means fewer experienced people maintaining the infrastructure that your website depends on.

And then there’s the other issue: Cloudflare is an American company, sitting in the traffic path between your site and your visitors. They see every DNS query, every HTTP header, every single request. And they control the kill switch. Not great for digital autonomy…

There are European alternatives. They don’t match Cloudflare feature-for-feature but, for most use cases, they’ll work just as well.

Bunny.net is the best-known one, and it’s even faster than Cloudflare. It’s EU-based (Slovenia), GDPR-compliant, and pricing is transparent. Here’s a post from someone who switched in less than 2 hours.

You don’t need to rush away from Cloudflare immediately, but it might be worth planning a move if you worry about sovereignty and/or resilience.

Colin