Cloudflare Backbone: A Fast Lane on the Busy Internet Highway

The Internet is an amazing place. It’s a communication superhighway, allowing people and machines to exchange exabytes of information every day. But it's not without its share of issues: whether it’s DDoS attacks, route leaks, cable cuts, or packet loss, the components of the Internet do not always work as intended.

The reason Cloudflare exists is to help solve these problems. As we continue to grow our rapidly expanding global network in more than 250 cities, while directly connecting with more than 9,800 networks, it’s important that our network continues to help bring improved performance and resiliency to the Internet. To accomplish this, we built our own backbone. Other than improving redundancy, the immediate advantage to you as a Cloudflare user? It can reduce your website loading times by up to 45% — and you don’t have to do a thing.

The Cloudflare Backbone

We began building out our global backbone in 2018. It comprises a network of long-distance fiber optic cables connecting various Cloudflare data centers across North America, South America, Europe, and Asia. This also includes Cloudflare’s metro fiber network, directly connecting data centers within a metropolitan area.

Our backbone is a dedicated network, Continue reading