CEO Matthew Prince In Focus As Cloudflare Recovers From Global Disruption

Internet infrastructure company Cloudflare announced on Friday that it had fully restored services after a brief outage earlier in the day that disrupted major global platforms including LinkedIn, Zoom, and several others. The incident marked the company's second significant service disruption in less than three weeks.

Cloudflare confirmed that the outage was not the result of a cyberattack. Instead, a change in how its firewall processes requests briefly made parts of its network unavailable. The company added that it was also investigating issues with the Cloudflare Dashboard and related APIs, which allow different software systems to connect.

Experts said it can take time to determine the exact cause of such outages, especially at large-scale internet infrastructure firms.

The downtime has drawn renewed attention to Cloudflare's cofounder and CEO, Matthew Prince. According to Forbes, Prince, who cofounded Cloudflare in 2009, holds about 8% of the company, contributing to an estimated net worth of over $2 billion. He took Cloudflare public in 2019, and the company has since grown into one of the world's leading web security and performance providers. Before Cloudflare, Prince served as a law professor and cofounded Unspam Technologies, a company focused on blocking spam content.As of now, Matthew Prince has a real-time net worth of $6.3 billion, with a $32 million (0.51%) increase.

Prince's views on the future of the internet have also resurfaced amid the outage. In comments reported by The Times, he said the era dominated by search engines is ending, suggesting the next 30 years will be shaped by artificial intelligence. He argued that search-driven traffic incentives have contributed to today's clickbait culture.

Prince envisions an AI-first internet, where creators are paid not through ads but by AI companies seeking high-quality data. He described a future where "humans get content for free, and robots have to pay a lot for it," adding that such a system could unlock a "golden age of content creation."