Among European Companies That Use a CDN, Nearly 9 in 10 Use Cloudflare

A contented transportation web sits successful beforehand of a website. Requests deed the CDN's separator servers first, which service cached content, terminate TLS, select traffic, and walk the remainder backmost to the origin. That intends the CDN is simply a shared dependency: if it goes down, each tract down it goes down together, whether aliases not those sites person thing other successful common.

I went done CipherCue's tracked European companies to spot which CDN fronts their websites. Of the 44,143 companies wherever we detected a CDN astatine all, 39,547 are down Cloudflare. That is 89.6%.

89.6% of 44,143 European companies pinch a detected CDN beryllium down Cloudflare

For a reference point, W3Techs put Cloudflare astatine 84.1% of sites wherever the reverse proxy supplier tin beryllium identified, arsenic of 28 July 2026 (w3techs.com). Our 89.6% is measured the aforesaid way, arsenic a stock of the identified group alternatively than of each sites, truthful the 2 are close; the European trim present runs a small higher.

I only counted companies that really tally a CDN. If a institution serves its tract consecutive from its ain origin, it is not successful these numbers astatine all. So this is not "Cloudflare vs the full web"; it is who the CDN users went with.

First spot and everyone else

The 4 CDN vendors we classify, counted arsenic chopped companies wherever each was detected:

Amazon is 2nd astatine 3,112, but that number needs a caveat. We observe Amazon done CloudFront, and Amazon is besides a wide unreality host, truthful immoderate of these are companies whose root happens to beryllium connected AWS alternatively than companies that deliberately chose CloudFront arsenic their beforehand door. Fastly does not person that ambiguity. It is simply a axenic CDN, and it comes 3rd astatine 1,299, which is astir 1 institution for each 30 down Cloudflare. Akamai, the oldest sanction successful the category, is 4th astatine 396.

The earthy counts adhd up to much than 44,143 because a institution tin beryllium down much than 1 vendor and is counted nether each (a Fastly beforehand doorway pinch an AWS origin, say). That double counting pads the smaller vendors' totals, not Cloudflare's share, which is measured against the full CDN-using set.

Per country

Rolling 8 countries into 1 fig hides the differences betwixt them, truthful present is the aforesaid measurement per country. Cloudflare is the mostly beforehand doorway successful each of them, but the stock ranges from astir 4 successful 5 successful Spain and Ireland to astir nineteen successful 20 successful the Netherlands.

CountryCompanies pinch a CDNBehind CloudflareCloudflare share

Netherlands	7,939	7,587	95.6%
United Kingdom	17,007	15,846	93.2%
Poland	2,896	2,682	92.6%
France	4,008	3,456	86.2%
Italy	3,661	3,126	85.4%
Germany	5,715	4,650	81.4%
Spain	2,001	1,576	78.8%
Ireland	792	624	78.8%

The UK has the largest absolute count, 15,846 CDN-using companies down Cloudflare successful 1 market. Germany is the lowest of the large markets astatine 81.4%, which is still 4 successful five.

What the attraction costs

Part of why a institution buys a CDN is resilience, and 1 advantage of independent suppliers is that they neglect independently. That advantage disappears erstwhile astir of a marketplace is down the aforesaid supplier. An incident location is nary longer 1 company's outage; it is astir of the market's outage, connected the aforesaid afternoon.

Cloudflare has published postmortems for respective incidents successful the past 15 months. Three were world and deed customers:

• 18 November 2025, astir 11:20 to 17:06 UTC. A database permissions alteration caused a Bot Management characteristic record to capable pinch copy entries and double successful size, past a limit the proxy enforced, which collapsed halfway CDN and information serving. Cloudflare's writeup states the outage was "not caused, straight aliases indirectly, by a cyber onslaught aliases malicious activity of immoderate kind" (blog.cloudflare.com).
• 5 December 2025. A configuration alteration applied while mitigating an industry-wide React Server Components vulnerability caused a world disruption (Cloudflare outage postmortems).
• 20 February 2026, from 17:48 UTC, lasting 6 hours 7 minutes. A cleanup automation task publication a buggy API consequence arsenic an instruction to retreat BYOIP prefixes, and 25% of them were pulled from the net via BGP. Cloudflare again states it was "not caused, straight aliases indirectly, by a cyberattack aliases malicious activity of immoderate kind" (blog.cloudflare.com).

None of the 3 was an attack. A doubled config file, a alteration made while patching personification else's vulnerability, a cleanup occupation that deleted excessively much: regular soul activity that reached the separator and took a batch of sites down pinch it. The companies successful the array did not request thing successful communal to spell offline together connected 18 November. Sharing a beforehand doorway was enough.

This is not astir Cloudflare being sloppy. Fastly and Akamai vessel bugs for illustration this too; theirs conscionable return less sites down because less sites are down them. That is the full point. When 1 supplier fronts astir of a market, its mistakes extremity being its ain problem and go everyone's, astatine the aforesaid time.

The CDN is not wherever the information lives

This says thing astir wherever a institution keeps its data. The CDN is conscionable the beforehand door; the root server, the database, and whoever processes the information beryllium down it, and for a GDPR aliases data-residency mobility that backmost extremity is what counts. Measure that alternatively and Europe looks better: group who excavation into API subdomains alternatively than the beforehand doorway usually move up acold much OVH and Hetzner than I spot here. I stuck to the beforehand doorway because it is the portion that goes down for everyone astatine once, which is what happened successful the outages above.

Check your ain beforehand door

You tin spot which CDN, if any, fronts a domain from its consequence headers:

curl -sI https://example.com | grep -i 'server\|cf-ray\|x-served-by\|x-amz-cf-id'

A cf-ray header aliases server: cloudflare indicates Cloudflare. x-served-by pinch a Fastly cache node indicates Fastly. x-amz-cf-id indicates Amazon CloudFront. No specified header, and a server worth naming your ain web server aliases root host, usually intends nary CDN successful front.

Method note

Source and cohort: CipherCue's ain observations of European institution websites (HTTP consequence fingerprinting and DNS), not a third-party dataset. The cohort is the companies successful our tracked entity group pinch a state attribution successful 1 of Germany, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Poland, France, Italy, Spain, aliases Ireland, and astatine slightest 1 CDN constituent detected. That gives 44,143 companies, utilizing the latest study per institution arsenic of 2026-09-07. This is simply a institution count wrong our dataset, not a typical sample of each institution successful these countries, and not a declare astir companies that usage nary CDN astatine all. The cohort besides skews toward mini and mid-sized companies alternatively than ample enterprises, and Cloudflare's free tier is strongest successful precisely that segment, truthful publication the fig arsenic attraction among CDN-using companies of this mix, not arsenic a connection astir ample enterprises specifically.

What "detected a CDN" means: we categorize a constituent arsenic a CDN erstwhile the consequence headers aliases serving fingerprint lucifer a known CDN vendor's shape (for illustration a cf-ray header for Cloudflare, a Fastly cache-node x-served-by, a CloudFront x-amz-cf-id). Companies that service straight from an root pinch nary recognised CDN fingerprint are excluded from the denominator. A misconfigured aliases different setup that hides these headers would beryllium undercounted.

Double counting: a institution tin beryllium detected down much than 1 CDN vendor and is past counted nether each. The Cloudflare stock (89.6%) is Cloudflare-detected companies divided by each companies pinch immoderate CDN detected, truthful a institution down some Cloudflare and Fastly counts erstwhile successful the numerator and erstwhile successful the denominator. Raw per-vendor counts truthful sum to much than 44,143.

The Amazon caveat: Amazon is detected via CloudFront, but Amazon is besides a wide unreality host. Some Amazon detections are front-door CloudFront choices and immoderate are AWS-origin serving; we do not abstracted the 2 here, which is why Fastly (an unambiguous axenic CDN) is called retired arsenic the nearest cleanable comparison.

Outage details are from Cloudflare's ain published postmortems, cited inline. Times and durations are arsenic stated by Cloudflare. We nexus the superior root for each alternatively than restating figures from secondary coverage.

Country grouping is our prime and is stated explicitly truthful the per-country array tin beryllium publication connected its own; the header fig is the national of these 8 markets, not a azygous country.

Finding this successful your ain market

CipherCue tracks CDN, hosting, email, and DNS infrastructure per company, filterable by vendor, country, and sector. If you waste a European replacement successful 1 of these categories, the directory shows which companies successful your marketplace presently tally which incumbent: the companies we observe down Cloudflare are listed there, and the EU vendor directory covers the alternatives by category.