rss-bridge 2025-09-29T14:00:00+00:00

15 years of helping build a better Internet: a look back at Birthday Week 2025

Rust-powered core systems, post-quantum upgrades, developer access for students, PlanetScale integration, open-source partnerships, and our biggest internship program ever — 1,111 interns in 2026.

15 years of helping build a better Internet: a look back at Birthday Week 2025

2025-09-29

Nikita Cano

Korinne Alpers

2 min read

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Cloudflare launched fifteen years ago with a mission to help build a better Internet. Over that time the Internet has changed and so has what it needs from teams like ours. In this year’s Founder’s Letter, Matthew and Michelle discussed the role we have played in the evolution of the Internet, from helping encryption grow from 10% to 95% of Internet traffic to more recent challenges like how people consume content.

We spend Birthday Week every year releasing the products and capabilities we believe the Internet needs at this moment and around the corner. Previous Birthday Weeks saw the launch of IPv6 gateway in 2011, Universal SSL in 2014, Cloudflare Workers and unmetered DDoS protection in 2017, Cloudflare Radar in 2020, R2 Object Storage with zero egress fees in 2021, post-quantum upgrades for Cloudflare Tunnel in 2022, Workers AI and Encrypted Client Hello in 2023. And those are just a sample of the launches.

This year’s themes focused on helping prepare the Internet for a new model of monetization that encourages great content to be published, fostering more opportunities to build community both inside and outside of Cloudflare, and evergreen missions like making more features available to everyone and constantly improving the speed and security of what we offer.

We shipped a lot of new things this year. In case you missed the dozens of blog posts, here is a breakdown of everything we announced during Birthday Week 2025.

Monday, September 22

What	In a sentence …
Help build the future: announcing Cloudflare’s goal to hire 1,111 interns in 2026	To invest in the next generation of builders, we announced our most ambitious intern program yet with a goal to hire 1,111 interns in 2026.
Supporting the future of the open web: Cloudflare is sponsoring Ladybird and Omarchy	To support a diverse and open Internet, we are now sponsoring Ladybird (an independent browser) and Omarchy (an open-source Linux distribution and developer environment).
Come build with us: Cloudflare’s new hubs for startups	We are opening our office doors in four major cities (San Francisco, Austin, London, and Lisbon) as free hubs for startups to collaborate and connect with the builder community.
Free access to Cloudflare developer services for non-profit and civil society organizations	We extended our Cloudflare for Startups program to non-profits and public-interest organizations, offering free credits for our developer tools.
Introducing free access to Cloudflare developer features for students	We are removing cost as a barrier for the next generation by giving students with .edu emails 12 months of free access to our paid developer platform features.
Cap’n Web: a new RPC system for browsers and web servers	We open-sourced Cap'n Web, a new JavaScript-native RPC protocol that simplifies powerful, schema-free communication for web applications.
A lookback at Workers Launchpad and a warm welcome to Cohort #6	We announced Cohort #6 of the Workers Launchpad, our accelerator program for startups building on Cloudflare.

Tuesday, September 23

What	In a sentence …
Building unique, per-customer defenses against advanced bot threats in the AI era	New anomaly detection system that uses machine learning trained on each zone to build defenses against AI-driven bot attacks.
Why Cloudflare, Netlify, and Webflow are collaborating to support Open Source tools	To support the open web, we joined forces with Webflow to sponsor Astro, and with Netlify to sponsor TanStack.
Launching the x402 Foundation with Coinbase, and support for x402 transactions	We are partnering with Coinbase to create the x402 Foundation, encouraging the adoption of the x402 protocol to allow clients and services to exchange value on the web using a common language
Helping protect journalists and local news from AI crawlers with Project Galileo	We are extending our free Bot Management and AI Crawl Control services to journalists and news organizations through Project Galileo.
Cloudflare Confidence Scorecards - making AI safer for the Internet	Automated evaluation of AI and SaaS tools, helping organizations to embrace AI without compromising security.

Wednesday, September 24

What	In a sentence …
Automatically Secure: how we upgraded 6,000,000 domains by default	Our Automatic SSL/TLS system has upgraded over 6 million domains to more secure encryption modes by default and will soon automatically enable post-quantum connections.
Giving users choice with Cloudflare’s new Content Signals Policy	The Content Signals Policy is a new standard for robots.txt that lets creators express clear preferences for how AI can use their content.
To build a better Internet in the age of AI, we need responsible AI bot principles	A proposed set of responsible AI bot principles to start a conversation around transparency and respect for content creators' preferences.
Securing data in SaaS to SaaS applications	New security tools to give companies visibility and control over data flowing between SaaS applications.
Securing today for the quantum future: WARP client now supports post-quantum cryptography (PQC)	Cloudflare’s WARP client now supports post-quantum cryptography, providing quantum-resistant encryption for traffic.
A simpler path to a safer Internet: an update to our CSAM scanning tool	We made our CSAM Scanning Tool easier to adopt by removing the need to create and provide unique credentials, helping more site owners protect their platforms.

Thursday, September 25

What	In a sentence …
Every Cloudflare feature, available to everyone	We are making every Cloudflare feature, starting with Single Sign On (SSO), available for anyone to purchase on any plan.
Cloudflare's developer platform keeps getting better, faster, and more powerful	Updates across Workers and beyond for a more powerful developer platform – such as support for larger and more concurrent Container images, support for external models from OpenAI and Anthropic in AI Search (previously AutoRAG), and more.
Partnering to make full-stack fast: deploy PlanetScale databases directly from Workers	You can now connect Cloudflare Workers to PlanetScale databases directly, with connections automatically optimized by Hyperdrive.
Announcing the Cloudflare Data Platform	A complete solution for ingesting, storing, and querying analytical data tables using open standards like Apache Iceberg.
R2 SQL: a deep dive into our new distributed query engine	A technical deep dive on R2 SQL, a serverless query engine for petabyte-scale datasets in R2.
Safe in the sandbox: security hardening for Cloudflare Workers	A deep-dive into how we’ve hardened the Workers runtime with new defense-in-depth security measures, including V8 sandboxes and hardware-assisted memory protection keys.

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