European CDN Users Put Cloudflare in Front of Nearly Nine in Ten Websites

Nearly 9 in 10 European companies that run a content delivery network put Cloudflare in front of their website, according to a new study of European company data. The study is titled “Among European Companies That Use a CDN, Nearly 9 in 10 Use Cloudflare.”

A CDN sits between visitors and a website. Its edge servers serve cached content, handle TLS, screen traffic, and pass remaining requests back to the origin server. That setup makes a CDN a shared reliance: when it fails, every website behind it fails at the same time, whether those websites have anything else in common or not.

The count

The study looked at tracked European companies to see which CDN sits in front of their websites. Of 44,143 companies where a CDN was found at all, 39,547 sit behind Cloudflare. That works out to 89.6%.

For comparison, W3Techs put Cloudflare at 84.1% of websites where the service standing in front of the website could be known, as of 28 July 2026. The study’s 89.6% figure is measured the same way, as a share of the known set rather than of all websites. The European number runs a little higher.

The count only includes companies that run a CDN at all. A company serving its website straight from its own origin does not appear in these figures. So this is not Cloudflare against the whole web; it is a look at who CDN users picked.

Here is a list of how the four vendors tracked in the study compare, in order:

1. Cloudflare — 39,547 companies
2. Amazon (via CloudFront) — 3,112 companies
3. Fastly — 1,299 companies
4. Akamai — 396 companies

One note on the Amazon figure: it is found through CloudFront, and Amazon is also a general cloud host, so some of those companies may simply have an origin on AWS rather than having chosen CloudFront as their CDN. Fastly does not carry that trouble, since it is a pure CDN. The total counts add up to more than 44,143 because a company can sit behind more than one vendor and is counted under each.

Country by country

Cloudflare is the top CDN in every country the study covered, but the share moves around. It runs from roughly four in five in Spain and Ireland to nearly all websites in the Netherlands. The UK has the largest total count, with 15,846 CDN-using companies behind Cloudflare. Germany is the lowest of the big countries at 81.4%.

When the front breaks

Cloudflare has published reports on three incidents that reached companies across many countries over the last fifteen months. On 18 November 2025, a database permissions change caused a Bot Management feature file to double in size, causing core CDN and safety services to fail from roughly 11:20 to 17:06 UTC. Cloudflare said the failure was not the result of an attack of any kind, nor of any bad intent.

On 5 December 2025, a setting change made while fixing an error found across many companies’ React Server Components caused a wide failure in service. On 20 February 2026, an automated job took a faulty API reply wrongly as an order to remove address numbers that companies had brought with them from their own supply and placed under Cloudflare’s care, rather than numbers Cloudflare had given them itself. Because of that mistake, 25% of those numbers were taken off the internet through BGP, and the trouble lasted 6 hours 7 minutes. Cloudflare again said the incident was not the result of an attack or of bad intent.

None of the three incidents involved an attack.

Fastly and Akamai ship errors too, but fewer websites go down because fewer websites sit behind them.

The CDN sits in front of a website, not behind it. It says nothing about where a company’s data actually lives — the origin server, the database, and the party that processes the data sit behind it, and the study notes that checking API addresses instead of the front tends to turn up far more OVH and Hetzner use across Europe. The front is just the part that fails for every website at once.

Source: ciphercue.com

CDN · Cloudflare · Europe · internet infrastructure · outages