Cloudflare Impact reaches $100 million in donations

This week, Cloudflare's Impact programs will reach $100 million in donated services. It's a significant milestone, and one that we are proud of because it means that thousands of organizations, like journalism outlets, civil society, state and local governments, election management bodies, and public schools are being protected from cyberattacks.

But Cloudflare's Impact programs have never been about philanthropy. They are a fundamental part of our business and our mission, and they continue to help guide almost everything we do.

As we celebrate this milestone and our 16th Birthday Week, we wanted to revisit not only how we got here, but also how our Impact programs continue to grow and evolve to help those working for the public interest.

Free → Impact

Cloudflare started as a free service. The original idea was to provide a basic version of our services to developers and small businesses for free, and then use the data about cyberattacks on their websites to build more sophisticated products that we could sell.

However, we quickly discovered that some of our free customers were not only doing essential work, like reporting on corruption in Africa or on the Russian invasion of Crimea, but also experiencing some of the largest attacks on our network. That realization changed how we thought about our free services. We committed not only to making them available for free for everyone, but also to doing more for organizations being targeted by powerful adversaries simply for serving the public.

Cloudflare launched Project Galileo in 2014 to provide more advanced security services for important but vulnerable people and organizations online, including journalists, human rights defenders, and civil society groups. Today, the program includes more than 3,500 domains in over 120 countries. In 2025, Cloudflare blocked more than 38.5 billion DDoS, website vulnerability, email phishing, and other cyberattacks against Project Galileo participants, almost 105.4 million per day.

Over the last 12 years, Cloudflare has continued to expand what we now call our Impact programs. Although each program is unique, our goal is the same: to support organizations and institutions serving the public, particularly those that would not otherwise have access to the necessary cybersecurity services. For example:

• The Athenian Project (2017): Supporting state and local governments operating democratic elections, which includes more than 440 websites in 33 U.S. states. We later expanded that program outside the United States and now protect election management bodies in eight countries, including Canada, North Macedonia, Georgia, and Moldova.
• Cloudflare for Campaigns (2020): Partnering with Defending Digital Campaigns to provide free cybersecurity services for candidates for public office, which now includes more than 530 websites across the United States. 
• Critical Infrastructure: Extending additional programs to help protect public schools, COVID-19 response efforts, the government of Ukraine, public health clinics, community networks, and other essential services.

Helping keep these organizations online by protecting their websites and internal data remains essential. In 2026, Cloudflare released its first annual report on cyberattacks against civil society, which found that civil society organizations are targeted more frequently and more intensely than other Cloudflare customers. For example, Project Galileo participants faced attempts to exploit security vulnerabilities in websites at a rate more than seven times higher than an average user. Cloudflare is also on pace to more than double the number of applications to Project Galileo from last year.

But Cloudflare's Impact programs have never been static; they evolve alongside our company and technology, and the organizations they serve. Increasingly that means not just defending public interest organizations, but empowering them to adapt and thrive in the era of AI.  

Looking to the future

In early September 2026, on a rainy day in Barcelona, Cloudflare co-hosted a hackathon. Because our developer platform is such an important part of our business, we hold these events all the time. But this one was different: instead of a room full of software engineers or startup founders, it was the first time we held an event specifically for journalists.

Media Party hackathon co-hosted by Cloudflare at the BIT Habitat in Barcelona (September 9, 2026).

The event was part of a three-day conference organized by Media Party, a nonprofit dedicated to media innovation through digital tools. The event was designed to bring together journalists, developers, and strategists to solve a single problem: how to help newsrooms adapt to an AI-driven, post-search information landscape. The sprint focused on four themes: workflow automation, agentic journalism, synthetic-content verifications, and information integrity.

Each team received free access to Cloudflare's developer platform and the assistance of volunteer Cloudflare engineers to see what they could build in a day. 

Four teams made it to the final round. The winning team, AIdas, built a tool that helps researchers and journalists study AI bias across politically contested topics by comparing how different LLMs answer the same question, and recording their responses as open data.

The hackathon was just one part of a broader effort across Cloudflare Impact to expand beyond cybersecurity services to help public interest groups adapt to a changing world:

• Protecting Local News from AI Crawlers: Last year, Cloudflare provided free access to our Bot Management and AI Crawl control for Project Galileo participants, including more than 750 journalists, independent news organizations and non-profits supporting news-gathering around the world. These tools will help these organizations understand and control how their content is accessed by AI crawlers, and safeguard their reporting from unauthorized scraping.
• Non-profit startups: Last year during Birthday Week, Cloudflare announced its startup program, which provides more than $250,000 in Cloudflare credits, would be available for the first time for non-profit organizations. This week we will announce the first 30 organizations accepted into the program and how they are serving their communities with tools built on our developer platform.
• Automation tools for human rights: This week we will also announce three new projects that Cloudflare engineers have built using our developer platform for three leading human rights organizations, covering topics including tracking transnational repression, digital rights legislation and policy development, and corporate human rights due diligence.

Across all of these new efforts, the goal remains the same: to help organizations doing essential work access the tools and support they need to continue to advance their missions.

Join Us

I had the opportunity to meet with two of the Cloudflare engineers who volunteered at the hackathon in Barcelona. They both mentioned to me that one of the reasons they came to work at Cloudflare was Project Galileo, and the chance to use their skills to help organizations working in their communities. 

It was an important reminder that Cloudflare's Impact programs and our mission are not just things we have done. They continue to shape our identity, including through the people who choose to come work with us. 

If that sounds like the kind of work you want to do, come join us.