Cloudflare Impact passes $100 million in donated services
Sixteen years of free protection for elections, newsrooms and civil society adds up to a milestone Cloudflare describes as core business rather than charity.
What the milestone covers
Cloudflare says its Impact programmes have now donated $100 million in services, a figure it reached during its sixteenth Birthday Week. The total covers free and discounted protection for journalism outlets, civil society groups, state and local governments, election bodies and public schools.
Project Galileo by the numbers
Project Galileo launched in 2014 and now covers more than 3,500 domains across over 120 countries. Cloudflare says it blocked more than 38.5 billion DDoS, website vulnerability, email phishing and other attacks against participants during 2025, which works out at almost 105.4 million a day.
The Athenian Project, started in 2017, protects more than 440 election websites in 33 US states and has since expanded to election management bodies in eight countries, including Canada, North Macedonia, Georgia and Moldova. Cloudflare for Campaigns, run with Defending Digital Campaigns since 2020, now covers more than 530 candidate websites in the United States.
AI, journalists and what comes next
Cloudflare's first annual report on cyberattacks against civil society, published in 2026, found that Project Galileo participants faced attempts to exploit website vulnerabilities at more than seven times the rate of an average user, and the company says applications to the programme are on pace to more than double last year's total.
The company also ran its first hackathon aimed specifically at journalists, co-hosted with Media Party in Barcelona on 9 September, where the winning team built a tool that compares how different language models answer politically contested questions and records the results as open data. Cloudflare has additionally opened its bot management and AI crawl controls to Galileo participants, including more than 750 journalists and news organisations, and says it will name the first 30 non-profit organisations accepted into its startup credit programme.
Our opinion
A donated-services total is a strange number to celebrate, because it measures the list price of what was given away rather than the harm prevented. The detail that matters more is the seven-fold attack rate against civil society groups, which is the closest thing to evidence that the free tier exists precisely where the targeting is worst. The awkward part is the timing: the same week Cloudflare counts its giving, small newsrooms are arguing with AI crawlers over the value of the content those programmes protect. Philanthropy is a strong defence and a weak business model, and Cloudflare knows both halves of that.