As Cloudflare goes down again, who owns it and has the outage affected the share price?
When trying to access websites, Internet users were greeted with a 500 Internal Server Error.
On November 18, Cloudflare went down due to an ‘internal service degradation.’ The company issued an update where they wrote: “Some services may be intermittently impacted.
“We are focused on restoring service. We will update as we are able to remediate. More updates to follow shortly.”
At the time, one user on Reddit wrote: “ Yikes,” whilst another said: “Reddit is glitching out too, which, to be fair, isn't unusual either.”
On December 5, Cloudflare provided an update which read: “In progress - Scheduled maintenance is currently in progress. We will provide updates as necessary.”
Websites affected by the outage on December 5 included Canva, Spotify, X, LinkedIn, Discord and Shopify. At 0.9:38 UTC, Cloudflare provided an update which read: “Cloudflare is investigating reports of a large number of empty pages when using the list API on a Workers KV namespace.”
Who owns Cloudflare, has the share price been affected?
Cloudflare is one of the biggest networks on the internet. It is a company that provides a platform of network services to improve website performance, security, and reliability. For those unfamiliar as to how Cloudflare began, according to their website, “In 2004, Matthew Prince and Lee Holloway set out to answer the basic question: “Where does email spam come from?” The two of them built a system that allowed anyone with a website to track how spammers harvested email addresses. Project Honey Pot was born.”
When Matthew Prince took a sabbatical from the company in 2009 to get his MBA from the Harvard Business School, he met Michelle Zatlyn, who is now the Chief Operating Officer at Cloudflare. They created a business plan together and Lee Holloway built the first working prototype.
Matthew Prince, Michelle Zatlyn and Lee Holloway then worked together refining the Cloudflare prototype and Cloudflare officially launched on September 27, 2010, at the TechCrunch Disrupt Conference.
In a press release by the company at the time, Matthew Prince said: “We are excited to launch Cloudflare to the public at TechCrunch Disrupt.“
“Cloudflare addresses two real problems everyone with a website has: making sure it’s fast and making sure it’s secure. By bringing the performance and security tools previously available only to the Internet giants to anyone with a website, Cloudflare is disrupting the very way in which content is made available online.”
On September 13, 2019, Cloudflare made its debut on the public market. In 2021, Forbes reported that “Michelle Zatlyn, cofounder of web infrastructure and security firm Cloudflare, is tech’s newest billionaire after the company’s stock reached a new record high on Tuesday.”
Both Michelle Zatlyn and Matthew Prince own shares in Cloudflare. Lee Holloway stepped down from Cloudflare in 2015, due to suffering the effects of Frontotemporal Dementia, a rare neurological disease.
According to reports, he still owns shares through affiliated trusts. At the time of writing Cloudflare’s share price stands at 204.15 USD and is currently down −0.20 (0.098%).