Cloudflare: Data without Context Are Semi-Helpful for PR
December 5, 2025
Another dinobaby post. No AI unless it is an image. This dinobaby is not Grandma Moses, just Grandpa Arnold.
Every once in a while, Cloudflare catches my attention. One example is today (December 5, 2025). My little clumsy feedreader binged and told me it was dead. Okay, no big deal. I poked around and the Internet itself seemed to be dead. I went to the gym and upon my return, I checked and the Internet was alive. A bit of poking around revealed that the information in “Cloudflare Down: Canva to Valorant to Shopify, Complete List of Services Affected by Cloudflare Outage” was accurate. Yep, Cloudflare, PR campaigner, and gateway to some of the datasphere seemed to be having a hiccup.
So what did today’s adventure spark in my dinobaby brain? Memories. Cloudflare was down again. November, December, and maybe the New Year will deliver another outage.
Let’s shift to another facedt of Cloudflare.
When I was working on my handouts for my Telegram lecture, my team and I discovered comments that Pavel Durov was a customer. Then one of my Zoom talks failed because Cloudflare’s system failed. When Cloudflare struggled to its very capable and very fragile feet, I noted a link to “Cloudflare Has Blocked 416 Billion AI Bot Requests Since July 1.” Cloudflare appears to be on a media campaign to underscore that it, like Amazon, can take out a substantial chunk of the Internet while doing its level best to be a good service provider. Amusing idea: The Wired Magazine article coincides with Cloudflare stubbing its extremely comely and fragile toe.
Centralization for decentralized services means just one thing to me: A toll road with some profit pumping efficiencies guiding its repairs. Somebody pays for the concentration of what I call facilitating services. Even bulletproof hosting services have to use digital nodes or junction boxes like Cloudflare. Why? Many allow a person with a valid credit card to sign up for self-managed virtual servers. With these technical marvels, knowing what a customer is doing is work, hard work.
The numbers amaze the onlookers. Thanks, Venice.ai. Good enough.
When in Romania, I learned that a big service provider allows a customer with a credit card use the service provider’s infrastructure and spin up and operate virtual gizmos. I heard from a person (anonymous person, of course), “We know some general things, but we don’t know what’s really going on in those virtual containers and servers.” The approach implemented by some service providers suggested that modern service providers build opacity into their architecture. That’s no big deal for me, but some folks do want to know a bit more than “Dude, we don’t know. We don’t want to know.”
That’s what interested me in the cited article. I don’t know about blocking bots. Is bot recognition 100 percent accurate? I have case examples of bots fooling business professionals into downloading malware. After 18 months of work on my Telegram project, my team and I can say with confidence, “In the Telegram systems, we don’t know how many bots are running each day. Furthermore, we don’t know how many Telegram have been coded in the last decade. It is difficult to know if an eGame is a game or a smart bot enhanced experience designed to hook kids on gambling and crypto.” Most people don’t know this important factoid. But Cloudflare, if the information in the Wired article is accurate, knows exactly how may AI bot request have been blocked since July 1. That’s interesting for a company that has taken down the Internet this morning. How can a firm know one thing and not know it has a systemic failure. A person on Reddit.com noted, “Call it Clownflare.”
But the paragraph Wired article from which I shall quote is particularly fascinating:
Prince cites stats that Cloudflare has not previously shared publicly about how much more of the internet Google can see compared to other companies like OpenAI and Anthropic or even Meta and Microsoft. Prince says Cloudflare found that Google currently sees 3.2 times more pages on the internet than OpenAI, 4.6 times more than Microsoft, and 4.8 times more than Anthropic or Meta does. Put simply, “they have this incredibly privileged access,” Prince says.
Several observations:
- What does “Google can see” actually mean? Is Google indexing content not available to other crawlers?
- The 4.6 figure is equally intriguing. Does it mean that Google has access to four times the number of publicly accessible online Web pages than other firms? None of the Web indexing outfits put “date last visited” or any time metadata on a result. That’s an indication that the “indexing” is a managed function designed for purposes other than a user’s need to know if the data are fresh.
- The numbers for Microsoft are equally interesting. Microsoft, based on what I learned when speaking with some Softies, was that at one time Bing’s results were matched to Google’s results. The idea was that reachable Web sites not deemed important were not on the Bing must crawl list. Maybe Bing has changed? Microsoft is now in a relationship with Sam AI-Man and OpenAI. Does that help the Softies?
- The cited paragraph points out that Google has 3.2 more access or page index counts than OpenAI. However, spot checks in ChatGPT 5.1 on December 5, 2025, showed that OpenAI cited more current information that Gemini 3. Maybe my prompts were flawed? Maybe the Cloudflare numbers are reflecting something different from index and training or wrapper software freshness? Is there more to useful results than raw numbers?
- And what about the laggards? Anthropic and Meta are definitely behind the Google. Is this a surprise? For Meta, no. Llama is not exactly a go-to solution. Even Pavel Durov chose a Chinese large language model over Llama. But Anthropic? Wow, dead last. Given Anthropic’s relationship with its Web indexing partners, I was surprised. I ask, “What are those partners sharing with Anthropic besides money?”
Net net: These Cloudflare data statements strike me as information floating in dataspace context free. It’s too bad Wired Magazine did not ask more questions about the Prince data assertions. But it is 2025, and content marketing, allegedly and unverifiable facts, and a rah rah message are more important than providing context and answering more pointed questions. But I am a dinobaby. What do I know?
Stephen E Arnold, December 5, 2025
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