You have almost certainly used Cloudflare without knowing it. Perhaps a website asked you to tick a box to prove you were human, or showed a brief page while it checked your connection. That pause is often Cloudflare at work.
The company stands between websites and the people who visit them. It keeps attackers out, filters traffic sent by machines and helps pages load faster. Few visitors notice it, yet its servers sit in cities all over the world, and many of the sites people open every day rely on them.
Cloudflare's sales have been growing faster lately, and its customers keep spending more with it. The company's reported losses, however, have grown too. As sales grow, a company usually moves closer to profit, so these two trends sit uneasily together. Is this a passing stage, or a lasting flaw?
