When major online services suddenly went dark earlier this week due to an outage at Cloudflare, it exposed how deeply intertwined so much of the web is with a single infrastructure provider. The outage itself stemmed from a largely technical but crucial aspect of the company’s infrastructure, its bot management feature.

Cloudflare’s systems support a wide swath of internet traffic, and a breakdown on its network reverberated globally. But just how big is Cloudflare’s footprint on the internet, and what does “running on Cloudflare” really mean for websites, enterprises, and users?

Cloudflare’s own public data shows that its global network comprises hundreds of data centres across more than 100 countries, allowing it to process traffic at the “edge” — that means close to users rather tha

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