CloudFlare continue to provide CDN and anti-DDoS services to Russia

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CloudFlare is known for its global CDN and security protection. The basic version of the free service provided by the company can provide global content acceleration for most personal or corporate websites and respond to DDoS/hacker/bot attacks, etc., There are also quite a few individuals and businesses in Russia using the services provided by CloudFlare.
At present, many companies have imposed “sanctions” on Russia, thus affecting a large number of individual users. For example, Namecheap, a low-priced domain name registrar, announced that it would stop providing services to Russia and force Russian users to move their domain names out, or directly do 403 forbidding access. There are also two U.S. network service operators that no longer serve Russia, which could affect the quality of access to Russia’s international networks.

Cloudflare Russia

CloudFlare has decided to continue providing the service to Russian users and enterprises. CloudFlare believes that information dissemination is very important now, and very frequent network attacks require CloudFlare to provide support. If the company ceases to provide services to Russian individuals or businesses, it is possible that many websites are slow or inaccessible outside of Russia due to the lack of global CDN acceleration, and normal access may also be affected if the website is attacked.

These issues all affect the dissemination of information, so imposing such sanctions by themselves does not make much practical sense, so CloudFlare decided that Russian citizens and businesses can continue to use the free or enterprise paid tiers offered by CloudFlare.

Statistics show that DNS query requests in the Russian region have apparently almost doubled since March 1. This also shows that a large number of users obtain information through the Internet, rather than relying only on traditional information media.

It is worth noting that CloudFlare is a US company after all and needs to comply with US laws. “The scope of new sanctions issued in the last few weeks have been unprecedented in their reach, frequency, and the number of different governments involved,” CEO CloudFlare, Matthew Prince wrote.

Cloudflare already had “a robust and comprehensive sanctions compliance program that allows us to track and take immediate steps to comply with new sanctions regulations as they are implemented,” Prince wrote. Since Russia invaded Ukraine, “our team has ensured that we are complying with these new sanctions as they are announced. We have closed off paid access to our network and systems in the new comprehensively sanctioned regions. And we have terminated any customers we have identified as tied to sanctions, including those related to Russian financial institutions, Russian influence campaigns, and the Russian-affiliated Donetsk and Luhansk governments.” Prince expects more sanctions from various governments and said Cloudflare will “continue to move quickly to comply with those requirements as they are announced.”

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