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On June 7, the Africa-Asia-Europe-1 (AAE-1) and SEA-ME-WE-5 (SMW-5) submarine cables suffered cable cuts, impactingInternet connectivity for millions of Internet users across multiple countries in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia
Cloudflare’s global network currently spans 193 cities across 90+ countries. With over 20 million Internet properties on our network, we increase the security, performance, and reliability of large portions of the Internet every time we add a location.
Cloudflare’s operations in Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA) have seen great progress over the last year and the future looks even brighter. I joined as Head of EMEA Sales, taking responsibility for our customer-facing activity across the region, just over a year ago.
The calendar has barely flipped to 2019 and already we’re seeing Internet disruptions. Today, Cloudflare can quantitatively confirm that Internet access has been shut down in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, information already reported by many press organisations.
At just shy of 200 million, Nigeria is the most populous country in Africa (Ethiopia is second and Egypt is third). That’s a lot of people to communicate with the world - and communicate they all do!
Looking back at our historical data, we realized how much the Internet and Cloudflare grew. With more than 150 data centers, 10 percent of web-based applications, customers everywhere around the world, from the tiny islands in the Pacific to the big metropolises.
Our newest data centers in Durban and Port Louis expand the Cloudflare network to 137 cities globally. We are delighted to reach this special milestone, and even more excited to help improve the performance and security of over 7 million Internet properties (and growing!) across 69 countries.
It is not uncommon for countries around the world to interrupt Internet access for political reasons or because of social unrest. We've seen this many times in the past (e.g. Gabon, Syria, Togo). Today, it appears that Internet access in the Democratic Republic of Congo has been greatly curtailed.
Back in December 2014, Cloudflare opened our first data center in Africa and our 30th datacenter globally. That was in Johannesburg, which has since seen over 10x growth in traffic delivered to South Africa and surrounding countries.
Cloudflare has just turned up two new datacenters (numbers 108 and 109). Both are around halfway between the Tropic of Cancer and the Equator.
On Wednesday afternoon, Cloudflare and other Internet companies noticed that the West African country of The Gambia had dropped off the Internet - the day before the presidential election that was planned to be held there on Thursday, December 1st.
We’re excited to kick off Cloudflare’s sixth birthday celebrations by announcing data center locations in 14 new cities across 5 continents. This expansion makes our global network one of the largest in the world, spanning 100 unique cities across 49 countries.
CloudFlare protects over 4 million Internet properties using our global network which spans 86 cities across 45 countries. Running this network give us a unique vantage point to track the evolving cost of bandwidth around the world.
It’s been a big year of expansion for CloudFlare’s global network as we added new data centers across six continents, and we’re certainly not done. Today we announce the launch of our newest data center in Cairo, Egypt and a partnership with Telecom Egypt.
Only two weeks after the announcement of our four new points of presence (PoPs) in the Middle East, it is with much hullabaloo that we announce our 43rd PoP, and second in Africa following Johannesburg, in Mombasa, Kenya (a.k.a. “The Castle”).
Fire up the celebration braai, Jozi! CloudFlare is here, and it’s a big one. An important milestone (our 30th data center) calls for an equally important new location: Johannesburg, South Africa, our first data center in Africa.
