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Cloudflare
Data center news, project activity, and monthly briefings for Cloudflare.
Editor's picks
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Understanding Carrier Hotels: Their Role in Digital Infrastructure and Connectivity
Telehouse Canada highlights its carrier-neutral carrier hotel capabilities at 151 Front Street West in downtown Toronto.
- Main announcement: Telehouse Canada promotes its carrier-neutral facility at 151 Front Street West, offering access to more than 200 connectivity partners, direct connections to Microsoft Azure ExpressRoute and AWS Direct Connect, and a partnership with Megaport to enable software-defined cloud on-ramps; the company also operates three interconnected downtown Toronto data centres linked by dark fiber and backs services with a 99.999% uptime SLA.
- Background and details: Telehouse emphasizes carrier-neutral colocation, high interconnection density, and multi-layered security (biometric access, mantraps, 24/7 security) as core features; it cites 35+ years of global data centre experience and sustainable operations including Enwave’s Deep Lake Water Cooling; no new financial commitments or timelines are announced in the article.
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Cloud and AI Infrastructure Cost Optimization: A Comprehensive Review of Strategies and Case Studies
Saurabh Deochake has published a revised arXiv paper (v2) expanding its scope to AI/ML infrastructure and GPU cost optimization, updated 27 Jan 2026.
- Main announcement: The author released Version 2 of the paper on 27 Jan 2026 (arXiv:2307.12479v2), significantly expanded to include AI/ML infrastructure and GPU cost optimization, updated with 2025 industry data and new case studies on LLM inference costs; title changed to reflect broader scope.
- Background and key findings: The paper is a comprehensive review covering traditional cloud pricing models, resource allocation, model optimization techniques (quantization, GPU instance selection, inference optimization), and reports that GPU compute represents 40-60% of technical budgets for AI-focused organizations, LLM inference costs decreased ~10x annually since 2021, and organizations can achieve 50-90% cost savings; includes case studies from Amazon Prime Video, Pinterest, Cloudflare, and Netflix, and links to PDF/HTML/TeX and DOI.
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Nokia Strengthens Edge AI Capabilities Through Strategic Collaboration with Blaize on Hybrid Inference Solutions Across Asia Pacific Regions
Blaize has announced a strategic Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with Nokia Solutions and Networks Singapore Pte. Ltd. to collaborate on Hybrid AI inference solutions across the Asia Pacific region (announcement dated January 27, 2026).
- Main announcement: The MOU establishes a non-binding cooperative framework for joint exploration, development, and deployment of Practical AI and Physical AI across Asia Pacific, focusing on edge and hybrid AI inference use cases, reference architectures and solution blueprints, joint validation of AI inference deployments for telecom, industrial, and smart infrastructure, and go to market and ecosystem initiatives including customer workshops, pilot programs, and solution demonstrations.
- Background and details: The collaboration pairs Blaize’s programmable, energy-efficient AI inference hardware and software with Nokia’s IP networking, data center networking, automation and cloud infrastructure; the MOU is non-binding and states parties may pursue future definitive agreements in the Asia Pacific region. The press release was issued by Blaize on January 27, 2026 and references Blaize’s prior business combination with BurTech Acquisition Corp. and SEC filings for additional risk disclosures.
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Uganda: Blanket Internet Shutdown Violates Rights
Human Rights Watch called on Ugandan authorities to immediately restore full internet access and to refrain from imposing blanket shutdowns ahead of the January 2026 general elections.
Main announcement/action: Human Rights Watch demands immediate restoration of full internet access and clear commitments against future shutdowns; the Uganda Communications Commission (UCC) ordered all mobile network operators and internet service providers to suspend public internet access nationwide starting at 6 p.m. on January 13, 2026, blocking social media, web browsing, video streaming, personal email services, messaging applications, while leaving a narrow list for critical services (hospital systems, banking networks, tax platforms, utilities, electoral commission portal); the directive also halted SIM card sales and disabled outbound data roaming to One Network Area countries, and network measurement sources (Cloudflare Radar, IODA) confirmed a drop in internet traffic.
Background and other details: The shutdown is part of a broader crackdown—the government ordered at least 10 NGOs to cease operations on January 12, 2026, and previously arrested activist Sarah Bireete on December 30, 2025; this follows 2016 and 2021 election-related shutdowns (including a five-day blackout in 2021 that preceded a continuing Facebook ban); international and regional bodies (African Union, East African Community, ACHPR) have called for an end to such practices; Human Rights Watch cites constitutional and international law (including article 9 of the African Charter) and urges telecoms to follow the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights.
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Lincoln Acquires, Plans Turnkey Delivery of Chandler, AZ Data Center - Lincoln Property Company
Lincoln Property Company has acquired a 191,000-square-foot, partially occupied data center at 2500 W. Frye Rd., Chandler, Arizona and will fit out vacant shell space to deliver turnkey data center capacity and cooling upgrades.
- Acquisition & development: Lincoln purchased the 191,000‑sq‑ft facility on 14.5 acres at 2500 W. Frye Rd., with 28MW confirmed utility power via an on-site Salt River Project (SRP) substation; Lincoln will fit out three halls to add 16MW of critical capacity (with an initial 4.2MW targeted for delivery in early Q1 2026), will serve as property manager, and leasing will be handled by Lincoln’s data center leasing team (contact: Rob Doretti, rob.doretti@lpc.com).
- Background & sustainability specifics: The project will convert from evaporative-cooled to air-cooled mechanical systems, potentially saving up to 3 million gallons of water per month for the City of Chandler; the sale was represented by CBRE (Kristina Metzger, Ben Wobschall, Mark Krison), the City of Chandler approved additional development as part of a prior development agreement, and Lincoln previously owned the asset (acquired 2018, sold 2019).
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https://www.rnbo.gov.ua/files/2025/NATIONAL_CYBER_SCC/20250812/July2025_2%20(1).pdf
The Center for Analysis and Development of Effective Policies (CADEP) and the National Institute for Strategic Studies (NISS) published the July 2025 report “AI Frontiers: innovations, breakthroughs, challenges” summarizing major AI market, policy, technology and security developments.
Report highlights and concrete items: The digest compiles market moves and deals including OpenAI–Oracle: $30 billion per year cloud/data-center agreement; NVIDIA achieving $4 trillion market capitalization and resuming limited chip sales to China; Meta’s announcement to build a 5 gigawatt AI data center; Mistral AI negotiating a $1 billion funding round; Palo Alto Networks proposed acquisition of CyberArk for ~$25 billion; Auterion contract (~$50 million) to deliver 33,000 AI drone control kits to Ukraine (delivery target: by end of 2025 as noted in report). The UK–OpenAI memorandum targets scaling national compute fivefold over five years with a £1 billion budget commitment noted in the partnership description.
Background, policy and implementation details: The report documents policy actions and timelines: the U.S. AI Action Plan (administration-level executive orders and 90 recommendations including export controls and streamlined environmental rules for data centers); European Commission rollout documents for EU AI Act implementation (voluntary GPAI code templates and guidance during transition); Pentagon agreements awarding up to $200 million per vendor (Google, OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI) for defense AI work; Taiwan’s AI industrial strategy projecting $510 billion economic uplift by 2040. Energy and infrastructure constraints are repeatedly flagged (e.g., xAI permitted to install 15 gas generators >80 MW for a Memphis datacenter; concerns about energy footprint of large data centers and supply-chain issues).
Recent news
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Google Cloud Faces Network Disruptions In India After Fire At Third-Party Data Centre
Google Cloud reported network disruptions in India after a fire at a third-party data centre triggered an emergency shutdown.
- Main announcement: Google Cloud reported that a fire at a third-party data centre forced an emergency power shutdown, isolating a non-compute local ‘Point of Presence’ (PoP) in Delhi on June 9, 2026 at 11:22 PDT (23:52 IST); the incident reduced available network capacity in Delhi and affected traffic from Delhi, Chennai, Mumbai and surrounding regions.
- Actions and details: Google Cloud rerouted significant traffic from the affected facility, warned that a subset of hybrid connectivity and VPC customers may still face intermittent latency spikes and packet loss, said it is exploring traffic mitigation measures and Internet Edge peering augmentation, and noted there is currently no workaround available.
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Arm shifts course, moves into silicon business
Arm has announced it will expand into production silicon and launched the Arm AGI CPU with Meta as lead partner and first customer.
- Main announcement: Arm is entering production silicon with the new Arm AGI CPU, positioned as a CPU purpose-built for agentic AI data centers, co-developed with Meta; the chip is designed by Ampere and will be manufactured by TSMC on a 3-nanometer process node. Key product specs announced include up to 136 Arm Neoverse V3 cores per CPU, 6GB/s memory bandwidth per core at sub-100ns latency, 300W TDP, claims of >2x performance per rack versus x86, support for 1U air-cooled deployments up to 8,160 cores per rack and liquid-cooled systems delivering 45,000+ cores per rack. Early systems are available now, with broader availability expected in the second half of the year.
- Background and partners: The chip was designed and manufactured by Ampere (acquired by SoftBank for $6.5 billion last year). Arm confirmed additional commercial momentum with partners/customers including Cerebras, Cloudflare, F5, OpenAI, Positron, Rebellions, SAP, and SK Telecom, and is working with OEM/ODM partners ASRock Rack, Lenovo, Quanta Computer, and Supermicro for system deliveries. Independent analyst commentary (Jim McGregor, Tirias Research) raised questions about benchmark comparators and emphasized the AGI CPU is targeted at AI/accelerator orchestration rather than general-purpose enterprise CPU use.
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Cloudflare uses ClickHouse for quadrillion-event analytics
Cloudflare demonstrated that it uses ClickHouse to run analytics across quadrillions of events with sub-two-second query responses, and that the system remains usable during simulated major outage scenarios.
- Main announcement: Cloudflare released details and demonstrated analytics performance using ClickHouse, showing a single query scanned 96 trillion events in an hour and returned in less than two seconds, and the same query over a full day scanned 1.61 quadrillion events with margin of error below 1%; the environment spans more than 300 data centres and maintained results when simulating the loss of a major North American data centre and then all of North America.
- Background and technical details: Cloudflare described using HTTP-based interactions, a design requiring less coordination between nodes, and a “soft clusters“ model to steer workloads to healthy nodes; the piece is a news report of a company demonstration and explanation rather than a speculative analysis.
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Cisco Talos 2025 year in review and lessons learned
Cisco released its Talos 2025 Year in Review report at RSAC 2026.
- Main announcement: Cisco Talos published a Year in Review (presented at RSAC 2026) showing attackers shifted from endpoint compromise to targeting identity, supply chain, and management planes, with React2Shell (CVE-2025-55182) becoming the No.1 targeted vulnerability and 178% surge in device-compromise attacks; the report also notes nearly 40% of top-targeted vulnerabilities impacted EOL devices.
- Background/details: The report documents state-sponsored activity increases (China-nexus +74%), examples of rapid zero-day weaponization (ToolShell/SharePoint), a $1.5 billion single cryptocurrency heist attributed to North Korea, and prescriptive actions (isolate management interfaces, enforce phishing-resistant MFA, audit/retire EOL network hardware, run January defensive exercises).
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Akamai Boosts Inference With ‘Thousands’ of Nvidia Blackwell GPUs
Akamai has announced it will deploy ‘thousands’ of Nvidia Blackwell GPUs, DPUs and servers across more than 4,000 locations worldwide to build a decentralized AI inference platform.
- Deployment details: Akamai plans to roll out ‘thousands’ of Nvidia Blackwell GPUs, DPUs and servers across 4,000+ locations worldwide to create a decentralized AI inference fabric intended to reduce latency and support large-scale inference workloads.
- Background & claims: The announcement follows October’s launch of Akamai Inference Cloud; Akamai claims the distributed platform can deliver latency reductions up to 2.5x and cost savings as much as 86% on AI inference versus hyperscaler infrastructure, and the initiative emphasizes Nvidia hardware for edge inference use cases.
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ControlMonkey extends configuration disaster recovery to cloud network vendors
ControlMonkey has expanded its Cloud Configuration Disaster Recovery platform to cover third-party network control plane vendors including Cloudflare, Akamai, Fastly, and F5.
- Main announcement: ControlMonkey now provides configuration backup and recovery for network control plane components (CDN configurations, firewall rules, DNS records, route tables, edge routing policies) by reverse engineering live configs into Terraform HCL, creating versioned daily snapshots, and enabling one-click restores that provision the last known-good configuration into a second tenant; the platform also offers APIs for integration with alerting tools like PagerDuty and Datadog.
- Background and scope: The capability expands a 2025 launch that targeted AWS/Azure/GCP; it was driven by customer requests because many organizations (Twizer cites ~90%) do not manage third-party network vendors with Terraform. The platform is explicitly for configuration recovery (ransomware/cyberattacks/errant AI agents or employee mistakes) and does not address vendor outages or provide multi-vendor failover routing. ControlMonkey plans further expansion into additional third-party service categories and highlights compliance relevance to SOC 2 and ISO 27001.
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Top 11 network outages and application failures of 2025
ThousandEyes (Cisco) published its 2025 recap listing the 11 most notable Internet outages of 2025 and provided recommendations to improve network resilience.
- Main announcement: ThousandEyes identified 11 major outages in 2025, with specific incidents and timelines: Asana (Feb 5 & 6; second outage ~20 minutes), Slack (Feb 26; 9 hours), X (Mar 10; several hours), Zoom (Apr 16; ~2 hours DNS NS records missing), Spotify (Apr 16; >2 hours), Google Cloud (Jun 12; >2.5 hours IAM update), Cloudflare (Jul 14; >1 hour BGP route announcements vanished), Commonwealth Bank (Oct 2; >2 hours), Azure Front Door (Oct 9 & 29; several hours), AWS DynamoDB (Oct 20; >15 hours for some customers), and Cloudflare (Nov 18; several hours intermittent).
- Context and recommendations: ThousandEyes attributes root causes primarily to configuration changes, backend failures, DNS/BGP issues, and centralized dependency cascades; recommended mitigations include staged rollouts, rapid detection and response, and tracing faults back to source (analysis and guidance written by ThousandEyes analysts including Mike Hicks).
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Cloudflare reports sharp global fall in shutdowns, outages
Cloudflare has reported a sharp fall in government-directed internet shutdowns in Q4 2025, while detailing multiple outages caused by cable damage, storms, power outages and war.
- Main announcement: Cloudflare reported only one government-ordered shutdown in Q4 2025 (in Tanzania, beginning Oct 29), with traffic falling >90% from ~12:30 local time, an initial ~26-hour disruption, a subsequent near-complete outage after partial restoration, and traffic not recovering fully until Nov 3. It also launched a Cloud Observatory page on Cloudflare Radar during the quarter.
- Details & timeline: Cloudflare attributed repeated outages to fibre/submarine cable damage (Digicel Haiti: Oct 16 and Nov 25; Pakistan: Oct 20 linked to PEACE cable; Cameroon: Oct 23 linked to WACS; Claro Dominicana: Dec 9), storms (Hurricane Melissa in Jamaica from Oct 28; Cyclone Senyar in Sri Lanka & Indonesia on Nov 26 with province-level drops of 80–95%), power outages (Dominican Republic transmission outage Nov 11 ~50% national drop; Kenya major outage Dec 9 ~18% national drop), and war-related damage (Russian drone strikes in Odesa, Ukraine, causing up to 57% traffic drop). Also noted cloud platform incidents including AWS us-east-1 and Azure Front Door, and two Cloudflare service incidents on Nov 18 and Dec 5 with described technical causes.
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Cloudflare reports Q4 fall in shutdowns amid outages
Cloudflare reported a sharp fall in government-directed internet shutdowns in Q4 2025 and tracked more than 180 internet disruptions across 2025.
- Main announcement: Cloudflare said it observed a single government-ordered shutdown in Q4 (in Tanzania) and over 180 disruptions in 2025, identified via traffic patterns and routing data on its global network spanning over 330 cities in 125+ countries.
- Details and context: The disruptions included subsea and fibre cable cuts (PEACE, WACS) affecting Haiti, Pakistan, Cameroon, Dominican Republic, extreme-weather impacts from Hurricane Melissa and Cyclone Senyar (Jamaica, Sri Lanka, Indonesia), conflict-related power outages in Ukraine (Odesa), and technical/provider failures including incidents at Vodafone UK, Fastweb, and cloud platform events in AWS us-east-1 and Azure Front Door in October.
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Anna’s Archive Multiple Domains Blocked After Spotify Scraping, Court Orders Cloudflare, NIXI to Comply
Spotify and major record labels (Universal Music Group, Sony Music Entertainment, Warner Music Group) have sued the anonymous operators of Anna’s Archive and obtained a broad temporary restraining order to block Anna’s Archive domains.
- Main action: The plaintiffs secured a temporary restraining order (issued Jan 16, 2026) from the US District Court for the Southern District of New York directing domain registries, registrars, hosting and internet service providers (including Cloudflare and the Public Interest Registry) to block access to annas-archive.org, annas-archive.li, and annas-archive.se, disable nameservers, prevent transfers, preserve evidence, and avoid notifying Anna’s Archive until blocking is implemented; the court set a hearing requiring Anna’s Archive to appear on January 16, 2026.
- Background and details: The complaint alleges Anna’s Archive scraped over 86 million music files (~99.6% of Spotify’s listening data) and relied on Cloudflare and other US-based services for reverse proxying; registries/registrars named to implement blocking include NIXI, Tucows, Hosting Concepts BV, and proxy URLs remain accessible though downloading of Spotify-related data has been disabled. The article also references a related 2024 La Liga order that led to blanket blocking of Cloudflare and legal notices demanding payments of €261 to €450 to identified users.
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Startup IO River aims to virtualize the edge and break CDN vendor lock-in
IO River announced it has closed a $20 million Series A funding round to accelerate deployment of its multi-edge virtualization platform.
- Announcement: IO River raised $20 million Series A (bringing total raised to $25.4 million) to expand its multi-edge virtualization platform that decouples application-layer services from CDN infrastructure; Series A was led by Venture Guides and New Era, with participation from S Capital and private investors Ofir Ehrlich and Pavel Gurvich.
- Context and details: The Boston-based startup (founded 2022) currently processes more than 200 petabytes monthly for paying customers in streaming, gaming, retail and SaaS; its platform uses WebAssembly and JavaScript to run microservices across heterogeneous CDN runtimes (Akamai, Cloudflare, Fastly, AWS) and integrates with Kubernetes at origin; it has partnerships with independent security vendors Check Point, Palo Alto Networks, Imperva to provide consistent security across multiple CDNs.
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Hybrid storage & cloud set to reshape data in 2026
Industry executives predict a shift in enterprise storage and cloud strategy for 2026.
- Executives from Seagate Technology, StorONE and CTERA forecast a shift to hybrid infrastructure and mixed-media storage in 2026, citing that nearly 75% of business leaders are moving from a ‘cloud-first’ to a hybrid model that blends public cloud, private data centres, and edge to strengthen security, enable real-time edge apps, and reduce costs.
- Key drivers and specifics: rising flash prices (noted cost ratios of 1:10 and higher against HDD), expanding AI workloads and the end-of-2025 cloud outages (AWS US East 1, Azure, Cloudflare). Vendors are promoting unified intelligent tiering and platforms that span on-premises, colocation sites and multiple hyperscalers; these changes are expected to play out through 2026.
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X Down For Thousands Of Users
X suffered another service disruption and regulatory action related to AI-generated content.
- Main announcement: X experienced a global outage with thousands of users affected; more than 3,000 users in India reported problems at 20:20 IST (issues loading the app and website), and the site was restored shortly after. The report references prior outages in March 2025, and May 2025 (including two outages within 24 hours, one linked to a data centre fire in Hillsboro, Oregon). The article also references a November Cloudflare outage that affected multiple global platforms.
- Background and related actions: X’s AI model GrokAI generated vulgar images of women; following an official notice from the Electronics and IT Ministry (MeitY), X removed 3,500 posts of obscene content in India and removed 600 accounts linked to such content. The article cites outage tracker Downdetector and mentions Cloudflare’s past network errors impacting many services.
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Outsmarting Data Center Outage Risks in 2026
Data Center Knowledge provides guidance on minimizing data center outage risks.
- Main guidance: The article recommends specific, actionable measures to reduce outage risk, including investment in backup power (UPS for short runtime of typically 10–20 minutes, plus backup generators and optional behind-the-meter power), granular and continuous temperature monitoring (sensor readings at least every minute and per-rack/per-server monitoring), multi-layered physical security (from perimeter to cabinet locks), fire risk mitigation (isolation plans and coordination with local fire authorities), redundant components (N+1, 2N classifications), automation of disaster recovery/failover, and creation of disaster recovery playbooks.
- Background and specifics: The piece cites high-profile outages at AWS, Cloudflare, and Microsoft Azure that disrupted millions of users at the end of 2025; notes that behind-the-meter power is expensive but can isolate supply from grid failures; recommends complementing UPS with generators for extended outages; advises coordination with local fire services to avoid inappropriate responses (e.g., water on servers); and stresses playbooks and automation to reduce outage duration and impact.