Company Overview - Cloudflare is a publicly traded company on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE: NET), with ownership distributed among public shareholders, institutional investors, and company insiders [1] - The company was co-founded by Matthew Prince, Michelle Zatlyn, and Lee Holloway, with Prince serving as CEO and Zatlyn as President and COO [2] Company History - Cloudflare's origins date back to 2004 with Project Honey Pot, aimed at combating email spam by tracking how spammers harvested email addresses [3] - In 2009, Michelle Zatlyn recognized the potential to evolve Project Honey Pot into a comprehensive security service, leading to the development of a business plan that won the Harvard Business School Business Plan competition [4][12] - The name "Cloudflare" was suggested to describe the concept of a "firewall in the cloud," and the company secured Series A financing later that year [4][12] Product Offerings - Cloudflare operates as a critical infrastructure provider, offering services that enhance security, performance, and reliability for websites [6][12] - Key offerings include a Content Delivery Network (CDN) that caches website content to improve load times, DDoS mitigation services to protect against traffic overloads, and various security tools like DNS services and firewalls [6][7][12] Recent Events - A recent multi-platform outage affected major services such as X (formerly Twitter), ChatGPT, Shopify, and Canva, linked to a system-wide issue at Cloudflare [9][11] - The outage began around 6:00 AM ET, with users encountering generic security messages indicating a malfunction in Cloudflare's systems, leading to widespread 500 errors [10][11] - Cloudflare acknowledged the issue and reported that services were beginning to recover, although users might still experience higher-than-normal error rates during remediation efforts [11]