Payload on Workers: a full-fledged CMS, running entirely on Cloudflare’s stack
Tucked behind the administrator login screen of countless websites is one of the Internet’s unsung heroes: the Content Management System (CMS). This seemingly basic piece of software is used to draft and publish blog posts, organize media assets, manage user profiles, and perform countless other tasks across a dizzying array of use cases. One standout in this category is a vibrant open-source project called Payload, which has over 35,000 stars on GitHub and has generated so much community excitement that it was recently acquired by Figma.
Today we’re excited to showcase a new template from the Payload team, which makes it possible to deploy a full-fledged CMS to Cloudflare’s platform in a single click: just click the Deploy to Cloudflare button to generate a fully-configured Payload instance, complete with bindings to Cloudflare D1 and R2. Below we’ll dig into the technical work that enables this, some of the opportunities it unlocks, and how we’re using Payload to help power Cloudflare TV. But first, a look at why hosting a CMS on Workers is such a game changer.
Behind the scenes: Cloudflare TV’s Payload instance
Most CMSs are designed to be hosted on a conventional server that runs Continue reading
Nationwide Internet shutdown in Afghanistan extends localized disruptions
Just after 11:30 UTC (16:00 local time) on Monday, September 29, 2025, subscribers of wired Internet providers in Afghanistan experienced a brief service interruption, lasting until just before 12:00 UTC (16:30 local time). Cloudflare traffic data for AS38472 (Afghan Wireless) and AS131284 (Etisalat) shows that traffic from these mobile providers remained available during that period.
However, just after 12:30 UTC (17:00 local time), the Internet was completely shut down, with Afghani news outlet TOLOnews initially reporting in a post on X that “Sources have confirmed to TOLOnews that today (Monday), afternoon, fiber-optic Internet will be shut down across the country.” This shutdown is likely an extension of the regional shutdowns of fiber optic connections that took place earlier in September, and it will reportedly remain in force “until further notice”. (The earlier regional shutdowns are discussed in more detail below.)
While Monday’s first shutdown was only partial, with mobile connectivity apparently remaining available, the graphs below show that the second event took the country completely offline, with web and DNS traffic dropping to zero at a national level, as seen in the graphs below.
While the shutdown will impact subscribers to fixed and mobile Internet Continue reading
15 years of helping build a better Internet: a look back at Birthday Week 2025
Cloudflare launched fifteen years ago with a mission to help build a better Internet. Over that time the Internet has changed and so has what it needs from teams like ours. In this year’s Founder’s Letter, Matthew and Michelle discussed the role we have played in the evolution of the Internet, from helping encryption grow from 10% to 95% of Internet traffic to more recent challenges like how people consume content.
We spend Birthday Week every year releasing the products and capabilities we believe the Internet needs at this moment and around the corner. Previous Birthday Weeks saw the launch of IPv6 gateway in 2011, Universal SSL in 2014, Cloudflare Workers and unmetered DDoS protection in 2017, Cloudflare Radar in 2020, R2 Object Storage with zero egress fees in 2021, post-quantum upgrades for Cloudflare Tunnel in 2022, Workers AI and Encrypted Client Hello in 2023. And those are just a sample of the launches.
This year’s themes focused on helping prepare the Internet for a new model of monetization that encourages great content to be published, fostering more opportunities to build community both inside and outside of Cloudflare, and evergreen missions like making more features available to Continue reading
An AI Index for all our customers
Today, we’re announcing the private beta of AI Index for domains on Cloudflare, a new type of web index that gives content creators the tools to make their data discoverable by AI, and gives AI builders access to better data for fair compensation.
With AI Index enabled on your domain, we will automatically create an AI-optimized search index for your website, and expose a set of ready-to-use standard APIs and tools including an MCP server, LLMs.txt, and a search API. Our customers will own and control that index and how it’s used, and you will have the ability to monetize access through Pay per crawl and the new x402 integrations. You will be able to use it to build modern search experiences on your own site, and more importantly, interact with external AI and Agentic providers to make your content more discoverable while being fairly compensated.
For AI builders—whether developers creating agentic applications, or AI platform companies providing foundational LLM models—Cloudflare will offer a new way to discover and retrieve web content: direct pub/sub connections to individual websites with AI Index. Instead of indiscriminate crawling, builders will be able to subscribe to specific sites that have opted in for Continue reading
Introducing Observatory and Smart Shield — see how the world sees your website, and make it faster in one click
Modern users expect instant, reliable web experiences. When your application is slow, they don’t just complain — they leave. Even delays as small as 100 ms have been shown to have a measurable impact on revenue, conversions, bounce rate, engagement and more.
If you’re responsible for delivering on these expectations to the users of your product, you know there are many monitoring tools that show you how visitors experience your website, and can let you know when things are slow or causing issues. This is essential, but we believe understanding the condition is only half the story. The real value comes from integrating monitoring and remedies in the same view, giving customers the ability to quickly identify and resolve issues.
That's why today, we're excited to launch the new and improved Observatory, now in open beta. This monitoring and observability tool goes beyond charts and graphs, by also telling you exactly how to improve your application's performance and resilience, and immediately showing you the impact of those changes. And we’re releasing it to all subscription tiers (including Free!), available today.
But wait, there’s more! To make your users’ experience in Cloudflare even faster, we’re launching Smart Shield, Continue reading
Monitoring AS-SETs and why they matter
An AS-SET, not to be confused with the recently deprecated BGP AS_SET, is an Internet Routing Registry (IRR) object that allows network operators to group related networks together. AS-SETs have been used historically for multiple purposes such as grouping together a list of downstream customers of a particular network provider. For example, Cloudflare uses the AS13335:AS-CLOUDFLARE AS-SET to group together our list of our own Autonomous System Numbers (ASNs) and our downstream Bring-Your-Own-IP (BYOIP) customer networks, so we can ultimately communicate to other networks whose prefixes they should accept from us.
In other words, an AS-SET is currently the way on the Internet that allows someone to attest the networks for which they are the provider. This system of provider authorization is completely trust-based, meaning it's not reliable at all, and is best-effort. The future of an RPKI-based provider authorization system is coming in the form of ASPA (Autonomous System Provider Authorization), but it will take time for standardization and adoption. Until then, we are left with AS-SETs.
Because AS-SETs are so critical for BGP routing on the Internet, network operators need to be able to monitor valid and invalid AS-SET memberships for Continue reading
Cloudflare just got faster and more secure, powered by Rust
Cloudflare is relentless about building and running the world’s fastest network. We have been tracking and reporting on our network performance since 2021: you can see the latest update here.
Building the fastest network requires work in many areas. We invest a lot of time in our hardware, to have efficient and fast machines. We invest in peering arrangements, to make sure we can talk to every part of the Internet with minimal delay. On top of this, we also have to invest in the software we run our network on, especially as each new product can otherwise add more processing delay.
No matter how fast messages arrive, we introduce a bottleneck if that software takes too long to think about how to process and respond to requests. Today we are excited to share a significant upgrade to our software that cuts the median time we take to respond by 10ms and delivers a 25% performance boost, as measured by third-party CDN performance tests.
We've spent the last year rebuilding major components of our system, and we've just slashed the latency of traffic passing through our network for millions of our customers. At the same time, we've made our Continue reading
Network performance update: Birthday Week 2025
We are committed to being the fastest network in the world because improvements in our performance translate to improvements for the own end users of your application. We are excited to share that Cloudflare continues to be the fastest network for the most peered networks in the world.
We relentlessly measure our own performance and our performance against peers. We publish those results routinely, starting with our first update in June 2021 and most recently with our last post in September 2024.
Today’s update breaks down where we have improved since our update last year and what our priorities are going into the next year. While we are excited to be the fastest in the greatest number of last-mile ISPs, we are never done improving and have more work to do.
We measure network performance by attempting to capture what the experience is like for Internet users across the globe. To do that we need to simulate what their connection is like from their last-mile ISP to our networks.
We start by taking the 1,000 largest networks in the world based on estimated population. We use that to give Continue reading
Eliminating Cold Starts 2: shard and conquer
Five years ago, we announced that we were Eliminating Cold Starts with Cloudflare Workers. In that episode, we introduced a technique to pre-warm Workers during the TLS handshake of their first request. That technique takes advantage of the fact that the TLS Server Name Indication (SNI) is sent in the very first message of the TLS handshake. Armed with that SNI, we often have enough information to pre-warm the request’s target Worker.
Eliminating cold starts by pre-warming Workers during TLS handshakes was a huge step forward for us, but “eliminate” is a strong word. Back then, Workers were still relatively small, and had cold starts constrained by limits explained later in this post. We’ve relaxed those limits, and users routinely deploy complex applications on Workers, often replacing origin servers. Simultaneously, TLS handshakes haven’t gotten any slower. In fact, TLS 1.3 only requires a single round trip for a handshake – compared to three round trips for TLS 1.2 – and is more widely used than it was in 2021.
Earlier this month, we finished deploying a new technique intended to keep pushing the boundary on cold start reduction. The new technique (or old, depending on your perspective) uses Continue reading
Code Mode: the better way to use MCP
It turns out we've all been using MCP wrong.
Most agents today use MCP by directly exposing the "tools" to the LLM.
We tried something different: Convert the MCP tools into a TypeScript API, and then ask an LLM to write code that calls that API.
The results are striking:
We found agents are able to handle many more tools, and more complex tools, when those tools are presented as a TypeScript API rather than directly. Perhaps this is because LLMs have an enormous amount of real-world TypeScript in their training set, but only a small set of contrived examples of tool calls.
The approach really shines when an agent needs to string together multiple calls. With the traditional approach, the output of each tool call must feed into the LLM's neural network, just to be copied over to the inputs of the next call, wasting time, energy, and tokens. When the LLM can write code, it can skip all that, and only read back the final results it needs.
In short, LLMs are better at writing code to call MCP, than at calling MCP directly.
For those that aren't familiar: Model Context Protocol is a standard protocol Continue reading
Introducing new regional Internet traffic and Certificate Transparency insights on Cloudflare Radar
Since launching during Birthday Week in 2020, Radar has announced significant new capabilities and data sets during subsequent Birthday Weeks. We continue that tradition this year with a two-part launch, adding more dimensions to Radar’s ability to slice and dice the Internet.
First, we’re adding regional traffic insights. Regional traffic insights bring a more localized perspective to the traffic trends shown on Radar.
Second, we’re adding detailed Certificate Transparency (CT) data, too. The new CT data builds on the work that Cloudflare has been doing around CT since 2018, including Merkle Town, our initial CT dashboard.
Both features extend Radar's mission of providing deeper, more granular visibility into the health and security of the Internet. Below, we dig into these new capabilities and data sets.
Cloudflare Radar initially launched with visibility into Internet traffic trends at a national level: want to see how that Internet shutdown impacted traffic in Iraq, or what IPv6 adoption looks like in India? It’s visible on Radar. Just a year and a half later, in March 2022, we launched Autonomous System (ASN) pages on Radar. This has enabled us to bring more granular visibility Continue reading
How Cloudflare uses the world’s greatest collection of performance data to make the world’s fastest global network even faster
Cloudflare operates the fastest network on the planet. We’ve shared an update today about how we are overhauling the software technology that accelerates every server in our fleet, improving speed globally.
That is not where the work stops, though. To improve speed even further, we have to also make sure that our network swiftly handles the Internet-scale congestion that hits it every day, routing traffic to our now-faster servers.
We have invested in congestion control for years. Today, we are excited to share how we are applying a superpower of our network, our massive Free Plan user base, to optimize performance and find the best way to route traffic across our network for all our customers globally.
Early results have seen performance increases that average 10% faster than the prior baseline. We achieved this by applying different algorithmic methods to improve performance based on the data we observe about the Internet each day. We are excited to begin rolling out these improvements to all customers.
The Internet is a massive collection of interconnected networks, each composed of many machines (“nodes”). Data is transmitted by breaking it up into small packets, and passing them Continue reading
Announcing Cloudflare Email Service’s private beta
If you are building an application, you rely on email to communicate with your users. You validate their signup, notify them about events, and send them invoices through email. The service continues to find new purpose with agentic workflows and other AI-powered tools that rely on a simple email as an input or output.
And it is a pain for developers to manage. It’s frequently the most annoying burden for most teams. Developers deserve a solution that is simple, reliable, and deeply integrated into their workflow.
Today, we're excited to announce just that: the private beta of Email Sending, a new capability that allows you to send transactional emails directly from Cloudflare Workers. Email Sending joins and expands our popular Email Routing product, and together they form the new Cloudflare Email Service — a single, unified developer experience for all your email needs.
With Cloudflare Email Service, we’re distilling our years of experience securing and routing emails, and combining it with the power of the developer platform. Now, sending an email is as easy as adding a binding to a Worker and calling send:
export default {
async fetch(request, env, ctx) {
await env.SEND_EMAIL.send({
to: [{ Continue readingAnnouncing the Cloudflare Data Platform: ingest, store, and query your data directly on Cloudflare
For Developer Week in April 2025, we announced the public beta of R2 Data Catalog, a fully managed Apache Iceberg catalog on top of Cloudflare R2 object storage. Today, we are building on that foundation with three launches:
Cloudflare Pipelines receives events sent via Workers or HTTP, transforms them with SQL, and ingests them into Iceberg or as files on R2
R2 Data Catalog manages the Iceberg metadata and now performs ongoing maintenance, including compaction, to improve query performance
R2 SQL is our in-house distributed SQL engine, designed to perform petabyte-scale queries over your data in R2
Together, these products make up the Cloudflare Data Platform, a complete solution for ingesting, storing, and querying analytical data tables.
Like all Cloudflare Developer Platform products, they run on our global compute infrastructure. They’re built around open standards and interoperability. That means that you can bring your own Iceberg query engine — whether that's PyIceberg, DuckDB, or Spark — connect with other platforms like Databricks and Snowflake — and pay no egress fees to access your data.
Analytical data is critical for modern companies. It allows you to understand your user’s behavior, your company’s performance, and alerts you to issues. Continue reading
Choice: the path to AI sovereignty
Every government is laser-focused on the potential for national transformation by AI. Many view AI as an unparalleled opportunity to solve complex national challenges, drive economic growth, and improve the lives of their citizens. Others are concerned about the risks AI can bring to its society and economy. Some sit somewhere between these two perspectives. But as plans are drawn up by governments around the world to address the question of AI development and adoption, all are grappling with the critical question of sovereignty — how much of this technology, mostly centered in the United States and China, needs to be in their direct control?
Each nation has their own response to that question — some seek ‘self-sufficiency’ and total authority. Others, particularly those that do not have the capacity to build the full AI technology stack, are approaching it layer-by-layer, seeking to build on the capacities their country does have and then forming strategic partnerships to fill the gaps.
We believe AI sovereignty at its core is about choice. Each nation should have the ability to select the right tools for the task, to control its own data, and to deploy applications at will, all without being Continue reading
Every Cloudflare feature, available to everyone
Over the next year Cloudflare will make nearly every feature we offer available to any customer who wants to buy and use it regardless of whether they are an enterprise account. No need to pick up a phone and talk to a sales team member. No requirement to find time with a solutions engineer in our team to turn on a feature. No contract necessary. We believe that if you want to use something we offer, you should just be able to buy it.
Today’s launch starts by bringing Single Sign-On (SSO) into our dashboard out of our enterprise plan and making it available to any user. That capability is the first of many. We will be sharing updates over the next few months as more and more features become available for purchase on any plan.
We are also making a commitment to ensuring that all future releases will follow this model. The goal is not to restrict new tools to the enterprise tier for some amount of time before making them widely available. We believe helping build a better Internet means making sure the best tools are available to anyone who needs them.
It’s not Continue reading
Safe in the sandbox: security hardening for Cloudflare Workers
As a serverless cloud provider, we run your code on our globally distributed infrastructure. Being able to run customer code on our network means that anyone can take advantage of our global presence and low latency. Workers isn’t just efficient though, we also make it simple for our users. In short: You write code. We handle the rest.
Part of 'handling the rest' is making Workers as secure as possible. We have previously written about our security architecture. Making Workers secure is an interesting problem because the whole point of Workers is that we are running third party code on our hardware. This is one of the hardest security problems there is: any attacker has the full power available of a programming language running on the victim's system when they are crafting their attacks.
This is why we are constantly updating and improving the Workers Runtime to take advantage of the latest improvements in both hardware and software. This post shares some of the latest work we have been doing to keep Workers secure.
Some background first: Workers is built around the V8 JavaScript runtime, originally developed for Chromium-based browsers like Chrome. This gives us a head start, because V8 Continue reading
R2 SQL: a deep dive into our new distributed query engine
How do you run SQL queries over petabytes of data… without a server?
We have an answer for that: R2 SQL, a serverless query engine that can sift through enormous datasets and return results in seconds.
This post details the architecture and techniques that make this possible. We'll walk through our Query Planner, which uses R2 Data Catalog to prune terabytes of data before reading a single byte, and explain how we distribute the work across Cloudflare’s global network, Workers and R2 for massively parallel execution.
During Developer Week 2025, we launched R2 Data Catalog, a managed Apache Iceberg catalog built directly into your Cloudflare R2 bucket. Iceberg is an open table format that provides critical database features like transactions and schema evolution for petabyte-scale object storage. It gives you a reliable catalog of your data, but it doesn’t provide a way to query it.
Until now, reading your R2 Data Catalog required setting up a separate service like Apache Spark or Trino. Operating these engines at scale is not easy: you need to provision clusters, manage resource usage, and be responsible for their availability, none of which contributes to the primary goal of Continue reading
Partnering to make full-stack fast: deploy PlanetScale databases directly from Workers
We’re not burying the lede on this one: you can now connect Cloudflare Workers to your PlanetScale databases directly and ship full-stack applications backed by Postgres or MySQL.
We’ve teamed up with PlanetScale because we wanted to partner with a database provider that we could confidently recommend to our users: one that shares our obsession with performance, reliability and developer experience. These are all critical factors for any development team building a serious application.
Now, when connecting to PlanetScale databases, your connections are automatically configured for optimal performance with Hyperdrive, ensuring that you have the fastest access from your Workers to your databases, regardless of where your Workers are running.
As Workers has matured into a full-stack platform, we’ve introduced more options to facilitate your connectivity to data. With Workers KV, we made it easy to store configuration and cache unstructured data on the edge. With D1 and Durable Objects, we made it possible to build multi-tenant apps with simple, isolated SQL databases. And with Hyperdrive, we made connecting to external databases fast and scalable from Workers.
Today, we’re introducing a new choice for building on Cloudflare: Postgres and MySQL PlanetScale databases, directly Continue reading
Cloudflare’s developer platform keeps getting better, faster, and more powerful. Here’s everything that’s new.
When you build on Cloudflare, we consider it our job to do the heavy lifting for you. That’s been true since we introduced Cloudflare Workers in 2017, when we first provided a runtime for you where you could just focus on building.
That commitment is still true today, and many of today’s announcements are focused on just that — removing friction where possible to free you up to build something great.
There are only so many blog posts we can write (and that you can read)! We have been busy on a much longer list of new improvements, and many of them we’ve been rolling out consistently over the course of the year. Today’s announcement breaks down all the new capabilities in detail, in one single post. The features being released today include:
Use more APIs from Node.js — including node:fs and node:https
Use models from different providers in AI Search (formerly AutoRAG)
Deploy larger container instances and more concurrent instances to our Containers platform
Run 30 concurrent headless web browsers (previously 10), via the Browser Rendering API
Use the Playwright browser automation library with the Browser Rendering API — now fully supported and GA