Cloudflare claims to be the fastest provider on 74% of top networks
Cloudflare moves from 60% to 74% of networks where it ranks as the fastest provider, thanks to a new measurement methodology based on Challenge Pages.
UptimeMag editorial team · 2 October 2026 · 2 min read
Cloudflare states that it is the fastest provider on 74% of the world's 1,000 largest networks, up from 60% measured in April 2026. The figure, published on 2 October 2026 on the company's official blog during Birthday Week, matters to anyone choosing a CDN for their clients: connection time has a direct bearing on how quickly a user reaches a website or an API.
The method: trimean of TCP connection time
According to Cloudflare's own statement, in August Cloudflare was the fastest provider on 74% of the top networks, a jump of 14 percentage points compared with the previous update during Agents Week in April. The improvement translates into concrete figures: the move from 60% to 74% is down to becoming the fastest provider in a further 150 of those 1,000 networks, with Cloudflare now the quickest in 38 additional countries.
The methodology set out by Cloudflare is based on connection time, that is, the time it takes a user's device to complete a TCP handshake when requesting content, aggregated using the trimean (a weighted average of the 25th, 50th and 75th percentiles) to reduce the effect of isolated outliers.
What's new: measurements from Challenge Pages
The new technical element in this update is the expansion of data collection. Alongside the traditional Cloudflare-branded error pages, this round also draws on Challenge Pages, the Turnstile-based verification screens that appear when a Web Application Firewall rule blocks a suspicious request. While a user is on one of these pages, a lightweight measurement runs in the background, comparing connection times to Cloudflare, Amazon CloudFront, Google, Fastly and Akamai.
Cloudflare notes that, for now, sampling covers only a small fraction of eligible free Challenge Pages, in addition to the existing collection from error pages, and that the company will only increase the sampling rate if the additional data improves measurement quality without affecting the end-user experience.
It should be said that this is a figure reported by the vendor itself, not an independent third-party measurement: Cloudflare itself notes that on many networks the leading providers are separated by a margin of just 1-2 milliseconds, a gap narrow enough to flip the rankings from one day to the next through simple statistical variability.
Cloudflare is not a Prime Software product.
Written with the help of artificial intelligence and checked by the editors (EU AI Act, art. 50).