Cloudflare said this week that its Impact programs, which give free cybersecurity services to news outlets, rights groups, election offices and public schools, will pass $100 million in donated services, a milestone it announced during the company’s 16th birthday observance.
The largest of the programs, Project Galileo, began in 2014 after Cloudflare noticed that some users of its free tier, including outlets reporting on corruption in Africa and on Russia’s seizure of Crimea, were absorbing some of the largest attacks on its network. The program now covers more than 3,500 domains in over 120 countries, the company said in a blog post on Wednesday. In 2025, Cloudflare said it blocked more than 38.5 billion attacks against Galileo participants, roughly 105.4 million a day.
Other programs followed. The Athenian Project, started in 2017, protects more than 440 state and local election websites in 33 U.S. states and has expanded to election management bodies in eight countries, including Canada, North Macedonia, Georgia and Moldova. Cloudflare for Campaigns, a 2020 partnership with the group Defending Digital Campaigns, now covers more than 530 candidate websites. The company has also extended protection to public schools, Covid-19 response efforts, public health clinics and the government of Ukraine.
The targets need it, by the company’s account. Cloudflare’s first annual report on attacks against civil society, released this year, found those organizations are attacked more often and more intensely than its other customers; Galileo participants faced attempts to exploit website vulnerabilities at more than seven times the rate of an average user. Applications to the program are on pace to more than double last year’s total, the company said.
More recently the programs have moved beyond keeping sites online. Last year Cloudflare gave free access to its bot management and A.I. crawler controls to more than 750 journalists, independent news organizations and nonprofits, tools meant to let them see and restrict how A.I. companies scrape their reporting. During last year’s birthday week it opened its startup program, which provides more than $250,000 in service credits, to nonprofits for the first time.
On Sept. 9 the company co-hosted a hackathon for journalists at the BIT Habitat center in Barcelona, part of a three-day conference run by Media Party, a nonprofit focused on media innovation. Teams got free access to Cloudflare’s developer platform and help from volunteer company engineers. The winner, a team called AIdas, built a tool that compares how different large language models answer the same question on contested political topics and records the responses as open data.
The company framed the giving as strategy rather than charity. The programs, it said in the blog post, “have never been about philanthropy” but are part of its business and mission, an argument that also happens to place its tools inside the newsrooms and nonprofits most exposed to A.I.-era scraping.
This week Cloudflare will name the first 30 nonprofits accepted into the startup program and announce three tools its engineers built for human rights organizations, tracking transnational repression, digital rights legislation and corporate human rights due diligence.