Thoughts on Cloudflare
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It might sound like I am defending cloudflare, but I am not. I share the author's concern about them becoming a monopoly that MITM's a lot of the Internet. But the author provides no evidence of to this claim. My experience has been the opposite: cloudflare interoperated with legacy systems and other cloud providers without locking us in or using anti-competitive tactics. Their presence often improved integration even when other vendors didn’t reciprocate. When people flock to a service because it’s genuinely useful rather than "can't leave Hotel California", that’s not a monopoly — it’s market preference.
That said, there is a real risk if innovation stalls or leadership becomes greedy. Companies that stop innovating sometimes resort to aggressive or extractive practices to stay relevant. It seems to be the trend once companies get too big to die - innovation stalls and their flywheel slows and they become desperate (or greedy) to stay relevant. I would monitor for those signs before I sound any alarm.
So Cloudflare has solved one problem (DDoS), while creating several new ones, which most people feel is a fair trade, but it's not a prefect world and there is no perfect solution.
Think about the consequences of that. Anyone who connects to your site from China is MITM by Alibaba.
And I would not be surprised if they were abusing their middlebox position to do all kinds of surveillance based on secret "warrants" in other places.
Source? AFAIK their China product is entirely separate and you need to specifically sign up for it. AWS/Azure have similar arrangements in China but you wouldn't say the Cloudfront users are getting MITMed by the CCP.
Apparently it's JD Cloud now. Or maybe it was the, and I don't recall correctly. It was a Chinese company, and it really freaked me out when I saw it.
Our company did not do any configuration to enable this behavior. This was in 2017.
AWS was a completely separate entity in China at the time. Fully backdoored of course. Opening an account there required a local company.
With Cloudflare, they were straight up MITM our site which had nothing to do with China at all.
I guess Cloudflare isn't doing this any more by default.
They probably didn't share the other cert because they'd have to give the private keys to these Chinese partner.
I would say that any MIIT approved infrastructure provider _is_ co-opted by the CCP. Its the entire point of requiring ICPs, tying the ICPs to network addresses/endpoints, and infra providers to be local entities; the MIIT gets their MITM equipment and RTBH routes directly in to the providers local DC.
As a web developer, I love how effortless it is to spin up a static site for free using their Pages or Workers features. Sure, I could rent a small server or even host projects on a home setup, but often I just want something simple, fast, and hassle-free - and Cloudflare delivers that at zero cost.
Has this convenience led me to spend money with them? Absolutely. These days I even rely on Cloudflare for DNS management, simply because their interface and overall experience are far better than what I was using before I found them.
That said, I’m not here to defend the company uncritically. I recognize the valid concerns and criticisms that exist. But no platform is without flaws, and in some situations I simply can’t — or don’t want to — prioritize the idealistic view. Sometimes I just want to experiment and build, and Cloudflare makes that easy.
I do not think that's the author complaint, though. I frequently get these cloudflare captachas and it is why I disabled their firewall (it's pure garbage) for my own sites. Cloudflare does not have any monopoly over the services you mentioned (workers, tunnels, images, etc.) but they do have a kind-of-monopoly over DNS/CDN.
When they start charging per packet and making you money, you will become as dependent on them as Apple developers are on Apple, and you'll find out how nice they are.
I have the same fear of tailscale. They are so amazing I just want to move every piece of my infra to them, business and personal, my family's devices, everything. But over time I've gained this instinctive distrust for low friction from startups, especially when the effect (intended or not) is you forgetting how to manage your own tech.
> ... build checks and balances to avoid sleepwalking into a dictatorship.
This resonates well with me. I don't personally know the checks and balances that need to exist so that Cloudflare, or any big influential company, refrains from becoming evil. I find CF relying on open protocols for interoperability with vendors a very positive sign. I don't ever see them (or any company) backtracking of supporting some open standard once they already have support for it. I'm not aware of them having "custom" solutions that also don't have a spec for them. For example, they are absolutely best suited for the pay-per-[ai]crawl business model and if they wanted they could have easily taken advantage of their position. Instead they are relying on open standards and contributing to them. Paint me naive but this gives me a good deal of confidence of the short and medium term.
But I confess that I don't follow the company/market closely enough to know if that is enough or more is needed. More check and balances always seems good but I have no creativity in this regard. Perhaps that was one of my criticisms with the author's post - to collect all the bad press and identify the shortcomings but to stop short of digesting all those findings into a meaningful resolution.
I'm unsure how much of these can actually be called "attacks" rather than "complying with local laws" that lets them operate in a lot of countries. Including hostile ones.
They really don't segment customer data sufficiently to mittigate this either. CloudFlare even officially says that they don't actually enforce even Regional Services and you have to do that yourself as a customer. Rest of customers get even fewer guarantees than that.
Have fun, three-letter agencies.
https://developers.cloudflare.com/data-localization/limitati...
> Regional Services operates on your hostname's IPs. We recommend using DNSSEC and/or DNS over HTTPS to ensure that DNS responses are secure and correct.
This of course is funny considering how CloudFlare has used the same DNSSEC key signing key for ⪆10 years. It also doesn't mention BGP hijacks or similar MITM attacks, because there's also not much anyone besides CloudFlare can do against that.
* someone is a homosexual * someone had sex out of wedlock * someone is a communist * someone is right-wing * someone is a Muslim * someone is _not_ a Muslim * someone spoke ill of the current ruler * someone hosted a messaging service, and didn’t ask users for a copy of their id
I once interviewed at a UK gambling company that was doing option #3, and during the interview it was made clear that I'd never be able to visit the US because they were operating there illegally. (I declined the offer.) Some time later, it was in the news that one of their executives had been arrested and imprisoned in the US when he visited on holiday. (https://www.pinsentmasons.com/out-law/news/another-uk-bettin...)
Cloudflare does not facilitate phising - it just made proxying and tunneling easier.
The breaches and bypasses mentioned are anything but - they are linking to a successful mitigation of an attack as if the attacker got away with something of value.
This entire article reeks of trying to fit the evidence to an agenda.
Considering they couldn't find actual evidence of problems and had to resort to mischaracterization this is actually a great reason to use Cloudflare.
---
Hello,
Cloudflare received your Phishing report regarding: ----
We are unable to process your report for the following reason(s):
We were unable to confirm phishing at the URL(s) provided.
Please be aware Cloudflare offers network service solutions including pass-through security services, a content distribution network (CDN) and registrar services. Due to the pass-through nature of our services, our IP addresses appear in WHOIS and DNS records for websites using Cloudflare. Cloudflare cannot remove material from the Internet that is hosted by others.
Please reply to this message, keeping the report identification number in the subject line intact, with the required information.
To respond to this issue, please reply to abusereply@cloudflare.com.
Thanks, The Cloudflare Team.
---
This is the typical response for me from Cloudflare - it took 2 more weeks before it was finally taken down. If I had to hazard a guess, your high volume of reports gets you into a very different support bucket than the occasional reporter.
1. They didn't take down an obvious banking scam site that was hiding behind their service
2. They forwarded my "report phishing content" submission, including contact information, to the scammer, resulting in a roughly 100x increase in the amount of spam I receive and ensuring that I won't ever use their reporting function again
They might pressure you to switch to paid plans if you start getting PBs of traffic, but until that point they will deliver your content for free. It is a huge advantage. Specially when you consider the egress pricing of major cloud providers.
Not to mention all the alternatives are doing MITM anyway. So why single out Cloudflare?
Depends on your perspective IMO... if I either think there is reason to believe they are spying on people for nefarious purposes, or if I do not want them to allow the government to spy on me without a warrant, I'd prefer they not have that ability to begin with, regardless of whether it's code sitting on the device or the web traffic that transits through them.
> So why single out Cloudflare?
Because I believe they have a much larger influence and percentage of traffic than all the alternatives combined, but you're right, they all have the same weakness and I would like a solution to it.
If you check the most recent version of the report from Spamhaus (Jan to June 2025)[1], Cloudflare is nowhere to be seen, and Digital Ocean, who they recommend as a Cloudflare alternative is listed as third largest botnet host in the world.
Looking back through the historical reports this isn't a new phenomenon, in Q4 of 2022 Digital Ocean was ranked #2 and Cloudflare was down at #17.
[0]https://www.spamhaus.org/resource-hub/botnet-c-c/botnet-thre...
[1]https://www.spamhaus.org/resource-hub/botnet-c-c/botnet-thre...
Other than that, alternatives do not go far as cloudflare does. If you experience a heavy DDOS, either you bankrupt with a large invoice or you suffer heavy outage.
I do not understand why this primary service misses to be listed. Nobody in the planet offers DDOS free, especially to news agencies at their difficult times.
If the all the ISPs can get the their networking knowledge up-to-date I can remove it.
I have set the protection level to the lowest setting to not trigger unnecessary capatchs.
Depending on what country you're in and what your traffic patterns look like, it might be higher. Some countries are >70% IPv6 traffic to Google.
Do you ever check your access logs to see when you're ready to go IPv6 only?
- I want to deploy a tiny service for personal use
- That has occasional requests (think ~10 a day)
- Needs to respond to a few daily events: a CRON job here and there, read an email, webhooks... Think a simpler Zapier
In principle this would be perfect for any of the many cloud function providers.
But AFAIK all of them have this vendor lock-in built into their business model and I just refuse to cave in.
Is there anything that I can do to not lock myself into an edge-computing ecosystem (or whatever this is called in the provider of choice) and still get the benefits? Is there any provider that supports any standard that is not tied specifically to their offering?
You could try to implement your logic in a WASI-compatible web assembly script - then things like I/O etc are abstracted and "standardised" (and then you can write it in whatever language makes you happy, though Rust will be the happy path in terms of ecosystem).
If you're into self-hosting, you can try Coolify - they take care of the Docker stuff and support all kinds services https://coolify.io/docs/services/overview (including plain Docker/compose deployments). So with this you could probably find a way to own it completely.
I understand that feeling but can be hard a provider that fill all that requirements without a expensive cost.
Integrate with the edge computing is part of the price you pay for all the conveniences like automatic builds, Cron and public reachable endpoints (and some of them almost free).
A minimal VPS with linux is always an alternative.
A trash website that I like a lot, but still a trash website.
Maybe in 20 years we’ll be able to use emojis on here.
And we still have good old ASCII :-)
Is YC a nostalgia-fueled organization or are they supposed to be investing in new technology?
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Browsers like now Chrome try and alert you if the URL visually looks spoofed (because they do support unicode symbols in the omnibox), but I'm yet to see how well this holds up in production.
And I hope in even 20 years we still can't use emojis here, our language isn't so pitiful that we must regress to brightly coloured symbols.
I imagine this issue is easily solved by everyone else but it’s just kind of accepted on one of the most popular tech industry message boards run by one of the most successful incubators/investment firms of all time who certainly has the money to make the experience less ancient.
My takeaway was basically that people use Cloudflare a lot because it is a strong service with a ton to offer at a very low price point. It's a bit like gmail - just very convenient and offers a lot for free or very cheap. Switching at that scale made a significant increase in their monthly bill.
I do applaud people who go out of their way to create alternatives to major services like cloudflare, gmail, chrome, etc. As an individual it can be hard to do though, or at least not always the path of least resistance.
There are plenty of applications where the bandwidth of PON fiber commonly deployed to homes is more than sufficient, and the extra latency is irrelevant.
Sure, it may be susceptible to DDoS attack, but if tens of millions of people were running personal and business systems from home it's debatable this would be less resistant than having a few centralized companies own us all.
Get real guys.
I had a PHB who didn't like that our web site went offline for 30 seconds each week.
I explained to her that the alternative would require $200,000 and six new employees.
She hasn't brought it up since.
Very few web sites are "mission critical." Even Facebook could go offline for a few seconds a week and nobody would care or notice.
We really don't need huge data centers hosting our notes and discussion forms and spreadsheets in order to make these things collaborative.
It would be A LOT easier to make that work if the internet was end to end by default again.
I don’t think that works. Internet attacks can be automated. Businesses need real defenses.
Right now, we are like a school of fish who are already living inside the nets of a handful of hyperscalers who don't have much reason to treat us well.
We might as well take our chances in the open ocean.
With the exception of DDoS attacks we can protect ourselves through continuous improvement of our software and protocols. The sooner we take responsibility for doing that the better off we will be.
And even the DDoS attacks we can mitigate with replication and secret backend links via second ISP/mobile.
Seems like it depends on what vendor you use and what services you're buying from them? It's an assumption that's hard to prove.
I'm using FreeBSD - This is on the hit list
I'm using Waterfox - This is on the hit list
I'm using my colocated server for a VPN from a reputable provider - This is on the hit list
I eliminate the last two and suffer with my ADSL. My ADSL isn't a standard domestic provider so I'm hit with that too for using an alternative provider. I am still being penalized for using FreeBSD.
Every page I encounter that uses Cloudflare ends up with a captcha. Why isn't there a way to verify myself that I am an actual legit person? I've clicked the captcha enough times, why does it have to be every single time?
Why can't I whitelist my IP?
If this is truly the only way to restrict bad actors, then it's pathetic. Am I'm going to be hit for using Xorg and not Wayland in the future? Their "bot" protection technology is years out of date.
I don't like that Cloudflare has total control on how I can see the internet. I don't need any of their services, I don't want any of their services and others may praise them but to me not required.
This may of worked five years ago, but like cookie banners, it doesn't work now. Yet they wish to spin up new modern services and neglect the old that actually made Cloudflare and not some power-hungry MiTM service. That's what it feels like but not that they will listen. I hate the fact that any point they can just go full anal and force you to X.
The internet is suppose to have some sort of freedom, it's less than freedom. Using the internet now is like an animal in a cage. Heck, I would even register an account with Cloudflare if it allowed me to verify legitimacy.
Will their power only grow? Yup.
I mean, I understand the opportunity for abuse, but if it displays fine as UTF8 in comments in the previous sentence it might make sense to display it correctly over there in the submission.
It’s the only bit of the Cloudflare stack (afaik) that did not have an open-source alternative for the JS ecosystem. I built heavily with DO on another OSS project, but realized it was incredibly problematic that our customers couldn’t truly self-host.