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Cloudflare’s global network and backbone in 2026.
Cloudflare's network recently passed a major milestone: we crossed 500 terabits per second (Tbps) of external capacity.
When we say 500 Tbps, we mean total provisioned external interconnection capacity: the sum of every port facing a transit provider, private peering partner, Internet exchange, or Cloudflare Network Interconnect (CNI) port across all 330+ cities. This is not peak traffic. On any given day, our peak utilization is a fraction of that number. (The rest is our DDoS budget.)
It’s a long way from where we started. In 2010, we launched from a small office above a nail salon in Palo Alto, with a single transit provider and a reverse proxy you could set up by changing two nameservers.
The early days of transit and peering
Our first transit provider was nLayer Communications, a network most people now know as GTT. nLayer gave us our first capacity and our first hands-on company experience in peering relationships and the careful balance between cost and performance.
From there, we grew city by city: Chicago, Ashburn, San Jose, Amsterdam, Tokyo. Each new data center meant negotiating colocation contracts, pulling fiber, racking servers, and establishing peering through Continue reading