Your AI bill is out of control. Cloudflare can fix it now.
There isn't a CIO on the planet not worried about AI spend right now. CFOs are increasingly nervous, too.
For fear of falling behind, many companies have pushed their employees to use AI as aggressively as possible. The edict was clear: "Move fast, we'll figure out the bill later." And for the most part, it worked: AI has been genuinely transformational for the teams that leaned in.
But the costs are real: we’ve heard countless horror stories of huge bills and painful overages on token spend.
Today, we're announcing spend controls in Cloudflare AI Gateway, and a closed beta for identity-driven budgets and routing using Cloudflare Access and your existing identity provider.
As we’ve spoken with hundreds of companies about their AI strategy, we’ve seen a common story: The company gives every engineer access to frontier models through a shared API key. Usage takes off. At the end of the month, finance pulls the invoice and nobody can explain where the money went. Was it the machine learning team training a new pipeline? Was it an intern running Claude Opus on email triage? Was it a runaway continuous integration job that burned through 50 million tokens in a weekend? Continue reading
VoidZero is joining Cloudflare
VoidZero, the company behind Vite, Vitest, Rolldown, Oxc, and Vite+, is joining Cloudflare. As part of this change, all team members of VoidZero are joining Cloudflare, too.
Before saying anything else, we want to make the most important thing clear: Vite, Vitest, Rolldown, Oxc, and Vite+ will stay open source, vendor-agnostic, and community-driven. Nothing about that changes.
Cloudflare's mission is to help build a better Internet. And a better Internet is an open Internet. Developers need choice, frameworks need a neutral foundation, and applications need to be portable. It is not reasonable to expect the entire web ecosystem to build around a single vendor. The most important tools and frameworks are portable by design.
Vite is one of the few foundational tools that the whole JavaScript ecosystem agrees on. It earned that position by being fast, excellent, portable, and vendor-neutral. One of the best ways Cloudflare can help build a better Internet is by investing in that foundational open source toolchain. A toolchain that makes the Internet better for everyone, not just people who use Cloudflare or choose to host with us.
Over the last few years we've invested heavily in making Cloudflare the best Continue reading
Enforcing the First AS in BGP AS_PATHs
Some recent route hijacks reported by Spamhaus captured our attention. In many of these hijack attempts, an apparent bad actor took advantage of unused autonomous system numbers, or ASNs. Notably in these hijacks, the actor appears to be creating fake AS_PATHs toward destinations, misdirecting traffic down an unexpected path.
By creating forged AS_PATHs, the hijacker is attempting to lead traffic somewhere it isn’t normally meant to go while also trying to conceal their identity. A hijacker could strip enough information away from a network path that they could pretend to be the origin of a Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) prefix themselves. Attackers can use this hijacked route to intercept traffic and for other nefarious purposes.
There is a simple solution for these cases: basic verification that a BGP peer autonomous system (AS) always includes their network as the “First AS” in an advertised route. To get a sense of how well these safeguards are implemented, we stress-tested several major networks and researched their BGP implementations. Read on to see what we learned.
The idea that an actor is creating fake AS_PATHs is supported when we take a closer look at implausible AS Continue reading
How we reduced core unit boot time from hours to minutes
Cloudflare's core is the centralized data centers that run our control plane, billing, and analytics — distinct from the globally distributed edge that handles user traffic. Core servers are bare metal, and when issues happen during reboot, the consequences can cascade fast.
Their boot sequence is orchestrated by UEFI, the modern firmware standard that initializes hardware and hands off control to the operating system. Small quirks in that handoff can have outsized consequences.
After a routine firmware update, some of our core servers were taking four hours to come back online, rather than just minutes as they did before. What should have been a one-day fleet-wide rollout was stretching into multi-day slogs. New nodes faced the full timeout gauntlet on their very first boot. Maintenance windows ballooned. Engineering teams had to babysit upgrades that should have run unattended.
The behavior we saw was brought to light when we were bringing nodes online that had been powered off for an extended period. These nodes’ firmware was out of date and required multiple updates to resolve. Combine this with recent updates to the boot protocols used by servers in some of our locations, and boot times on the affected Continue reading
How we built Cloudflare’s data platform and an AI agent on top of it
Cloudflare processes more than a billion events every second. Our network spans 330+ cities in 120+ countries. Behind every HTTP request, every Worker invocation, every R2 read operation, there is data, and a lot of it.
For years, that data was not very easy to access. It lived in dozens of production databases, ClickHouse clusters, Kafka streams, Google Cloud buckets, BigQuery datasets, and a long tail of pipelines. To answer a simple question like "How many domains that signed up today are in the Top 100 by traffic?", an analyst at Cloudflare had to know which system to ask, what credentials to use, what query language to write, and whether the data they were looking at was sampled, fresh, or seven-days stale. As a result, it was difficult to glean informed insights from the data.
To solve this problem, we built two in-house tools: Town Lake, Cloudflare's unified data analytics platform, and Skipper, an AI data agent that runs on top of it. Town Lake is a single SQL interface to everything Cloudflare knows, and Skipper is how anyone at Cloudflare can ask questions in plain English and get correct, auditable answers back in seconds.
This is the story Continue reading
Iran’s Internet is partially restored, Cloudflare Radar data shows
On Tuesday, May 26, Iran’s vice president announced that Internet access had started to be restored in the country after being cut off almost three months ago, following the launch of U.S. and Israeli attacks on February 28.
Cloudflare Radar data confirms increased activity and indicates a partial restoration of the Internet in Iran. In this blog post, we’ll examine a range of data points that provide a lens into this prolonged shutdown – and the signs that Iran’s citizens are increasingly able to connect once again. As the situation continues to unfold, Radar will have the latest data on Iran’s connectivity.
Iranian citizens have experienced two national Internet shutdowns this year. The first began on January 8 around 16:30 UTC (20:00 local time), and we explored the impact seen over the first few days in a blog post. Traffic from Iran remained near zero until January 21, when a small amount of traffic returned, only to disappear a little over 24 hours later. A similar brief restoration also occurred on January 25, before traffic recovered more fully beginning on January 27.
In late February, as military strikes on Iran escalated, a second Continue reading
Announcing Claude Compliance API support with Cloudflare CASB
Today, we are extending Cloudflare’s cloud access security broker (CASB) to support the Claude Compliance API. Security and compliance teams can now monitor Claude usage directly in the Cloudflare dashboard. No endpoint agents required.
Enterprise security teams have long struggled to see how users interact with sanctioned and unsanctioned applications. The rapid adoption of AI applications has made this harder. Employees spend significant time in these new surface areas, and their interactions differ from traditional SaaS: users upload files, share freeform prompts, and providers generate content that may contain sensitive data.
Cloudflare CASB helps solve this problem. One API integration gives you out-of-band visibility and control over the applications your organization uses. This integration builds on our existing support for AI governance, extending coverage over the most common tools security teams now manage.
AI adoption has outpaced security governance. While IT and security teams raced to enable AI tools for productivity, the controls lagged behind. Most organizations today operate with partial visibility: they may block unauthorized AI tools at the network layer, but they cannot see what happens inside sanctioned ones.
This matters because AI tools are not like traditional SaaS Continue reading
Announcing Claude Managed Agents on Cloudflare
Cloudflare and Anthropic have collaborated to integrate Claude Managed Agents with Cloudflare Sandboxes. Our new integration gives you more control over your agent sandboxes, secures connections to private services, and improves observability.
In the past year, Cloudflare’s Developer Platform has expanded to give more developers the tools they need to run agents at scale. This includes:
Sandboxes for full stateful Linux microVMs at scale
Agents SDK, providing simple and customizable agent framework
Browser Run, which gives agents fully programmable and observable browsers
Dynamic Workers, allowing for dynamic sandboxed code execution at massive scale
Our goal is to make Cloudflare the simplest, most secure, and most programmable cloud for agents.
Integrating with Claude Managed Agents is another step in this direction. You can run your agent loop on the Claude Platform, while using Cloudflare to execute code, secure connections, and run custom tool calls.
To get going in just minutes, we’ve created a default deployment template that gives you the following:
Enhanced security - Run all agent traffic through customizable proxies. This allows you to securely inject credentials, prevent data exfiltration, and better observe how your agents interact with the outside world.
Sandbox control and observability - Get Continue reading
Project Glasswing: what Mythos showed us
For the last few months, we've been testing a range of security-focused LLMs on our own infrastructure. These LLMs help identify potential vulnerabilities in our own systems, so we can fix them – and they also show us what attackers are going to be able to do with the latest models.
None of these LLMs has captured more attention than Mythos Preview, from Anthropic. A few weeks ago, we were invited to use Mythos Preview as part of Project Glasswing. We soon pointed it at more than fifty of our own repositories – to see what it would find, and to see how it works.
This post shares what we observed, what the models did well and what they didn't, and how the architecture and process around them needs to change, so they can be used at scale.
Mythos Preview is a real step forward, and it's worth saying that plainly before getting into anything else. We've been running models against our code for a while now, and the jump from what was possible with previous general-purpose frontier models to what Mythos Preview does today is not just a refinement of what came before.
It's Continue reading
Our billing pipeline was suddenly slow. The culprit was a hidden bottleneck in ClickHouse
At Cloudflare, we are heavy users of ClickHouse, an open-source analytical database management system. We redesigned one of our largest ClickHouse tables to add a column to the partitioning key. The change enabled per-tenant retention on a table that serves hundreds of internal teams. The design went through several rounds of revision and review with engineers across multiple teams before we landed on the final approach. But a few weeks after rollout, the jobs that produce most of Cloudflare's bills were running up against their hard daily deadline.
All the usual suspects looked clean: I/O, memory, rows scanned, parts read. Everything we would normally check when a ClickHouse query is slow appeared to be normal. The problem turned out to be lock contention in query planning, something we'd never had reason to look for before.
This is the story of how this migration exposed a hidden bottleneck in ClickHouse's internals, and the patches we wrote to fix it.
We use ClickHouse to store over a hundred petabytes of data across a few dozen clusters. To simplify onboarding for our many internal teams, we built a system called "Ready-Analytics" in early 2022.
The premise is Continue reading
Browser Run: now running on Cloudflare Containers, it’s faster and more scalable
We’ve enabled higher usage limits, faster performance, and better reliability for Browser Run by rebuilding on top of Cloudflare’s Containers.
You can now spin up 60 browsers per minute via the Workers binding and run up to 120 concurrently — 4x the previous limit. Also, Quick Action response times dropped more than 50%. You don't need to change anything: these improvements are live today. On top of that, we’re shipping fixes and new features faster than before. Read on to learn how we did it and see the data.
Browser Run enables developers to programmatically control and interact with headless browser instances running on Cloudflare’s global network. That’s useful for end-to-end testing of web applications, securely investigating suspicious URLs, and leveraging how browsers can easily render PDF documents, amongst other quick actions like capturing screenshots and extracting content. More recently, it’s become a critical enabler of AI agents to interact with the web. We’re building Browser Run to be the go-to platform to responsibly utilize automated browsers securely at massive scale.
Before adopting Cloudflare Containers, we shared infrastructure with Browser Isolation (BISO). While technically similar, BISO’s larger container images slowed Continue reading
When “idle” isn’t idle: how a Linux kernel optimization became a QUIC bug
CUBIC, standardized in RFC 9438, is the default congestion controller in Linux, and as a result governs how most TCP and QUIC connections on the public Internet probe for available bandwidth, back off when they detect loss, and recover afterward. At Cloudflare, our open-source implementation of QUIC, quiche, uses CUBIC as its default congestion controller, meaning this code is in the critical path for a significant share of the traffic we serve.
In this post, we’ll tell the story of a bug in which CUBIC's congestion window (cwnd) gets permanently pinned at its minimum and never recovers from a congestion collapse event.
The story starts with a Linux kernel change aimed at bringing CUBIC into line with the app-limited exclusion described in RFC 9438 §4.2-12 — a fix to a real problem in TCP that, when ported to our QUIC implementation, surfaced unexpected behaviors in quiche. It has a happy ending: an elegant (near-)one-line fix that broke the cycle.
Before we dive into the core problem, a quick refresher on Congestion Control Algorithms (CCAs) may help to set the stage.
The central knob a CCA turns is the congestion window (cwnd Continue reading
Building for the future
This afternoon, we sent the following email to our global team. One of our core values at Cloudflare is transparency, and we believe it's important that you hear this directly from us because it’s a major moment at Cloudflare.
Team:
We are writing to let you know directly that we’ve made the decision to reduce Cloudflare’s workforce by more than 1,100 employees globally.
The way we work at Cloudflare has fundamentally changed. We don’t just build and sell AI tools and platforms. We are our own most demanding customer. Cloudflare’s usage of AI has increased by more than 600% in the last three months alone. Employees across the company from engineering to HR to finance to marketing run thousands of AI agent sessions each day to get their work done. That means we have to be intentional in how we architect our company for the agentic AI era in order to supercharge the value we deliver to our customers and to honor our mission to help build a better Internet for everyone, everywhere.
Today is a hard day. This decision unfortunately means saying goodbye to teammates who have contributed meaningfully to our mission and to building Cloudflare Continue reading
How Cloudflare responded to the “Copy Fail” Linux vulnerability
On April 29, 2026, a Linux kernel local privilege escalation vulnerability was publicly disclosed under the name "Copy Fail" (CVE-2026-31431). Cloudflare’s Security and Engineering teams began assessing the vulnerability as soon as it was disclosed. We reviewed the exploit technique, evaluated exposure across our infrastructure, and validated that our existing behavioral detections could identify the exploit pattern within minutes.
There was no impact to the Cloudflare environment, no customer data was at risk, and no services were disrupted at any point. Read on to learn how our preparedness paid off.
Cloudflare operates a global Linux server infrastructure at an immense scale, with datacenters located across 330 cities. We maintain a custom Linux kernel build based on the community's Long-Term Support (LTS) versions to manage updates effectively at this volume. At any given time, we may utilize multiple LTS versions from various series, such as 6.12 or 6.18, which benefit from extended update periods.
The community regularly merges and releases security and stability updates which trigger an automated job to generate a new internal kernel build approximately every week. These builds undergo testing in our staging data centers to Continue reading
When DNSSEC goes wrong: how we responded to the .de TLD outage
On May 5, 2026, at roughly 19:30 UTC, DENIC, the registry operator for the .de country-code top-level domain (TLD), started publishing incorrect DNSSEC signatures for the .de zone. Any validating DNS resolver receiving these signatures was required by the DNSSEC specification to reject them and return SERVFAIL to clients, including 1.1.1.1, the public DNS resolver operated by Cloudflare.
The country-code top-level domain for Germany, .de, is one of the largest on the Internet. On Cloudflare Radar, it consistently ranks among the most broadly queried TLDs globally. An outage at this level of the DNS hierarchy has the potential to make millions of domains unreachable.
In this post, we’ll walk through what we saw, the impact of these events, and how we applied temporary mitigations while DENIC resolved the issue.
DNSSEC (Domain Name System Security Extensions) adds cryptographic authentication to DNS. When a zone is signed with DNSSEC, each set of records is accompanied by a digital signature known as an RRSIG record that lets a resolver verify the records haven’t been tampered with. Unlike encrypted DNS protocols, such as DNS over TLS (DoT) and DNS over HTTPs (DoH), DNSSEC is about Continue reading
Code Orange: Fail Small is complete. The result is a stronger Cloudflare network
Over the past two and a bit quarters, we've undertaken an intensive engineering effort, internally code-named "Code Orange: Fail Small", focused on making Cloudflare's infrastructure more resilient, secure, and reliable for every customer.
Earlier this month, the Cloudflare team finished this work.
While improving resiliency will never be a “job done” and will always be a top priority across our development lifecycle, we have now completed the work that would have avoided the November 18, 2025 and December 5, 2025 global outages.
This work focused on several key areas: safer configuration changes, reducing the impact of failure, and revising our “break glass” procedures and incident management. We also introduced measures to prevent drift and regressions over time, and strengthened the way we communicate to our customers during an outage.
Here we explain in depth what we shipped, and what it means for you.
What it means for you: In most cases, Cloudflare internal configuration changes no longer reach our network instantly and are instead rolled out progressively with real-time health monitoring. This allows our observability tools to catch problems and revert issues before they affect your traffic.
In order to catch potentially dangerous deployments Continue reading
Introducing Dynamic Workflows: durable execution that follows the tenant
When we first launched Workers eight years ago, it was a direct-to-developers platform. Over the years, we have expanded and scaled the ecosystem so that platforms could not only build on Workers directly, but they could also enable their customers to ship code to us through many multi-tenant applications. We now see on Workers: Applications where users describe what they want, and the AI writes the implementation. Multi-tenant SaaS where every customer's business logic is, at runtime, some TypeScript the platform has never seen before. Agents that write and run their own tools. CI/CD products where every repo defines its own pipeline.
Last month, when we shipped the Dynamic Workers open beta, we gave those platforms a clean primitive for the compute side: hand the Workers runtime some code at runtime, get back an isolated, sandboxed Worker, on the same machine, in single-digit milliseconds. Durable Object Facets extended the same idea to storage — each dynamically-loaded app can have its own SQLite database, spun up on demand, with the platform sitting in front, as a supervisor. Artifacts did the same for source control: a Git-native, versioned filesystem you can create by the tens of millions, one per agent, Continue reading
Post-quantum encryption for Cloudflare IPsec is generally available
While more than two-thirds of human-generated TLS traffic to Cloudflare is already protected by post-quantum cryptography, the world of site-to-site networking has been a different story. For years, the IPsec community remained caught between the high bar of Internet-scale interoperability and the niche requirements of specialized hardware. That gap is now closing.
Earlier this month, we announced that Cloudflare has moved its target for full post-quantum security forward to 2029, spurred by several recent advances in quantum computing. To advance that goal, we’ve made post-quantum encryption in Cloudflare IPsec generally available.
Using the new IETF draft for hybrid ML-KEM (FIPS 203), we’ve successfully tested interoperability with branch connectors from Fortinet and Cisco — meaning you can start protecting your wide-area network (WAN) against harvest-now-decrypt-later attacks today using hardware you already have.
This post explains how we implemented the new hybrid IPsec handshake, why it took four years longer to land than its TLS counterpart, and how the industry is finally consolidating around a standard that works at Internet scale.
Cloudflare IPsec is a WAN Network-as-a-Service that replaces legacy network architectures by connecting data centers, branch offices, and cloud VPCs to Cloudflare's global IP Anycast Continue reading
Agents can now create Cloudflare accounts, buy domains, and deploy
Coding agents are great at building software. But to deploy to production they need three things from the cloud they want to host their app — an account, a way to pay, and an API token. Until now these have been tasks that humans handle directly. Increasingly, agents handle them on the user’s behalf. The agent needs to perform all the tasks a human customer can. They’re given higher-order problems to solve and choose to use Cloudflare and call Cloudflare APIs.
Starting today, agents can provision Cloudflare on behalf of their users. They can create a Cloudflare account, start a paid subscription, register a domain, and get back an API token to deploy code right away. Humans can be in the loop to grant permission, but no human steps are required from start to finish. There’s no need to go to the dashboard, copy and paste API tokens, or enter credit card details. Without any extra setup, agents have everything they need to deploy a new production application in one shot. And with Cloudflare’s Code Mode MCP server and Agent Skills, they’re even better at it.
This all works via a new protocol that we’ve co-designed with Stripe as part Continue reading
Shutdowns, power outages, and conflict: a review of Q1 2026 Internet disruptions
In the first quarter of 2026, government-directed shutdowns figured prominently, with prolonged Internet blackouts in both Uganda and Iran, a stark contrast to the lack of observed government-directed shutdowns in the same quarter a year prior. This quarter, we also observed a number of Internet disruptions caused by power outages, including three separate collapses of Cuba's national electrical grid. Military action continued to disrupt connectivity in Ukraine and also impacted hyperscaler cloud infrastructure in the Middle East. Severe weather knocked out Internet connectivity in Portugal, while cable damage disrupted connectivity in the Republic of Congo. A technical problem hit Verizon Wireless in the United States, and unknown issues briefly disrupted connectivity for customers of providers in Guinea and the United Kingdom.
This post is intended as a summary overview of observed and confirmed disruptions and is not an exhaustive or complete list of issues that have occurred during the quarter. A larger list of detected traffic anomalies is available in the Cloudflare Radar Outage Center. Note that both bytes-based and request-based traffic graphs are used within this post to illustrate the impact of the observed disruptions, with the choice of metric generally made based on which better illustrates the Continue reading